Die angemessene Erfassung der Stärke und Richtung von Anreizen durch soziale Erwünschtheit

Volker Stocké () and Christian Hunkler
Additional contact information
Volker Stocké: Sonderforschungsbereich 504, Postal: L 13, 15, D-68131 Mannheim
Christian Hunkler: Sonderforschungsbereich 504, Postal: L 13, 15, D-68131 Mannheim

No 04-16, Sonderforschungsbereich 504 Publications from Sonderforschungsbereich 504, Universität Mannheim, Sonderforschungsbereich 504, University of Mannheim

Abstract: The study investigates the social desirability of four characteristics often asked as self-descriptive questions in surveys. These are the intensity of watching television, the consumption of alcohol, the frequency of past blood donations and the degree of happiness in life. We compare the validity of three differently elaborated operationalizations of the magnitude and direction of the perceived incentives for social desirable response behavior. The standard method only accounts for the social desirability of a strong occurrence of the respective attribute, however, the second procedure takes differences between strong and weak occurrences into account, and the third implementation considers additionally the evaluation of a medium occurrence. Using data from a local survey based on a random probability sample, first, we find a substantial proportion of the respondents reporting u-shaped desirability profiles for the consumption of alcohol and intensity of watching television. For these topics only the third and most sophisticated operationalization is an appropriate measure of the potential distortions caused by social desirability. Secondly, monotonic desirability profiles are observed for past blood donations and happiness in life. Here, the additional effort necessary for the global difference scores as the second most elaborated measure, improves considerably the magnitude of incentives from social desirability which can be identified. Contemporary research has almost exclusively applied the standard method; however, our investigation suggests that this is under no conditions an adequate measure of the strength and the direction of potential social desirability bias.

Pages: 37 pages
Date: 2004-05-07
Note: Financial support from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, SFB 504, at the University of Mannheim, is gratefully acknowledged.
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sfb504.uni-mannheim.de/publications/dp04-16.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to www.sfb504.uni-mannheim.de:80 (nodename nor servname provided, or not known)

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:xrs:sfbmaa:04-16

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Sonderforschungsbereich 504 Publications from Sonderforschungsbereich 504, Universität Mannheim Contact information at EDIRC., Sonderforschungsbereich 504, University of Mannheim
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Carsten Schmidt ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).