Sensitive Questions in Online Surveys: Experimental Results for the Randomized Response Technique (RRT) and the Unmatched Count Technique (UCT)

Elisabeth Coutts () and Ben Jann

No 3, ETH Zurich Sociology Working Papers from ETH Zurich, Chair of Sociology

Abstract: Gaining valid answers to so-called sensitive questions is an age-old problem in survey research. Various techniques have been developed to guarantee anonymity and minimize the respondent's feelings of jeopardy. Two such techniques are the randomized response technique (RRT) and the unmatched count technique (UCT). In this study we evaluate the effectiveness of different implementations of the RRT (using a forced-response design) in a computer-assisted setting and also compare the use of the RRT to that of the UCT. The techniques are evaluated according to various quality criteria, such as the prevalence estimates they provide, the ease of their use, and respondent trust in the techniques. Our results indicate that the RRTs are problematic with respect to several domains, such as the limited trust they inspire and non-response, and that the RRT estimates are unreliable due to a strong false "no" bias, especially for the more sensitive questions. The UCT, however, performed well compared to the RRTs on all the evaluated measures. The UCT estimates also had more face validity than the RRT estimates. We conclude that the UCT is a promising alternative to RRT in self-administered surveys and that future research should be directed towards evaluating and improving the technique.

Keywords: sensitive questions; online survey; randomized response technique; unmatched count technique; item count technique; methodological experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C42 C81 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 34 pages
Date: 2008-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Downloads: (external link)
http://repec.ethz.ch/ets/papers/coutts_jann_online_rrt.pdf First version, 2008 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found

Related works:
Journal Article: Sensitive Questions in Online Surveys: Experimental Results for the Randomized Response Technique (RRT) and the Unmatched Count Technique (UCT) (2011)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ets:wpaper:3

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ETH Zurich Sociology Working Papers from ETH Zurich, Chair of Sociology
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Heidi Bruderer ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).