Do Survey Estimates of the Public’s Compliance with COVID-19 Regulations Suffer from Social Desirability Bias?

Martin Larsen, Jacob Nyrup and Michael Bang Petersen
Additional contact information
Martin Larsen: Aarhus University
Jacob Nyrup: Aarhus University
Michael Bang Petersen: Aarhus University

Journal of Behavioral Public Administration, 2020, vol. 3, issue 2

Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic has led governments to instate a large number of restrictions on and recommendations for citizens’ behavior. One widely used tool for measuring compliance with these strictures are nationally representative surveys that ask citizens to self-report their behavior. But if respondents avoid disclosing socially undesirable behaviors, such as not complying with government strictures in a public health crisis, estimates of compliance will be biased upwards. To assess the magnitude of this problem, this study compares measures of compliance from direct questions to those estimated from list-experiments - a response technique that allows respondents to report illicit behaviors without individual-level detection. Implementing the list-experiment in two separate surveys of Danish citizens (n>5,000), we find no evidence that citizens under-report non-compliant behavior. We therefore conclude that survey estimates of compliance with COVID-19 regulations do not suffer from social desirability bias.

Keywords: COVID-19; Compliance; Co-production; List-experiment; Social desirability bias (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D90 D91 I12 Z00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (19)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journal-bpa.org/index.php/jbpa/article/download/164/85 (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:bpd:articl:v:3:y:2020:i:2:jbpa.32.164

DOI: 10.30636/jbpa.32.164

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Behavioral Public Administration from Center for Experimental and Behavioral Public Administration
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sebastian Jilke ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).