Methodological Issues in the Design of Online Surveys for Measuring Unethical Work Behavior: Recommendations on the Basis of a Split-Ballot Experiment

Kristel Wouters (), Jeroen Maesschalck, Carel Peeters and Marijke Roosen

Journal of Business Ethics, 2014, vol. 120, issue 2, 275-289

Abstract: In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in unethical work behavior. Several types of survey instruments to collect information about unethical work behavior are available. Nevertheless, to date little attention has been paid to design issues of those surveys. There are, however, several important problems that may influence reliability and validity of questionnaire data on the topic, such as social desirability bias. This paper addresses two important issues in the design of online surveys on unethical work behavior: the response scale for questions regarding the frequency of certain types of unethical work behavior and the location of the background questions in an online survey. We present the results of an analysis of a double split-ballot experiment in a large sample (n = 3,386) on governmental integrity. We found that, when comparing response scales that have labels for all categories with response scales that only have anchors at the end, the latter provided answers with higher validity. The study did not provide support for the conventional practice of asking background questions at the end. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014

Keywords: Unethical work behavior; Social desirability bias; Participation bias; Measurement error; Response scales; Anchors/labels; Background questions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10551-013-1659-5 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:kap:jbuset:v:120:y:2014:i:2:p:275-289

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/10551/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10551-013-1659-5

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Business Ethics is currently edited by Michelle Greenwood and R. Edward Freeman

More articles in Journal of Business Ethics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().