The Misreporting Trade-Off Between List Experiments and Direct Questions in Practice: Partition Validation Evidence from Two Countries

Patrick M. Kuhn and Nick Vivyan

Political Analysis, 2022, vol. 30, issue 3, 381-402

Abstract: To reduce strategic misreporting on sensitive topics, survey researchers increasingly use list experiments rather than direct questions. However, the complexity of list experiments may increase nonstrategic misreporting. We provide the first empirical assessment of this trade-off between strategic and nonstrategic misreporting. We field list experiments on election turnout in two different countries, collecting measures of respondents’ true turnout. We detail and apply a partition validation method which uses true scores to distinguish true and false positives and negatives for list experiments, thus allowing detection of nonstrategic reporting errors. For both list experiments, partition validation reveals nonstrategic misreporting that is: undetected by standard diagnostics or validation; greater than assumed in extant simulation studies; and severe enough that direct turnout questions subject to strategic misreporting exhibit lower overall reporting error. We discuss how our results can inform the choice between list experiment and direct question for other topics and survey contexts.

Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)

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:cup:polals:v:30:y:2022:i:3:p:381-402_5

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Political Analysis from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().