Social Desirability Bias: Experimental Evidence on Reporting Parental Practices

Karina Colombo () and Elisa Failache
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Karina Colombo: European University Institute

No 25-08, Documentos de Trabajo (working papers) from Instituto de Economía - IECON

Abstract: We analyze social desirability bias in the reporting of parenting practices through survey questions. We develop a method to experimentally identify this bias by purposely inducing social desirability in questions on feeding practices through a random information provision on best practices. Our results show a treatment effect of -0.160 standard deviations in the reporting of children ultra-processed food consumption, in line with the presence of social desirability bias. We find a larger bias for women, less educated individuals, caregivers that believe child development is not malleable to parental investment, and those with risk preferences above the median. Although the Marlowe-Crowne scale positively correlates with our experimental measure of social desirability bias, we show that an heterogeneous effect analysis by this variable does not fully remove the issue.

Keywords: social desirability bias; experiments; parental practices (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 D83 D91 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 35 pages
Date: 2025-02
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https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12008/50005

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ulr:wpaper:dt-08-25

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