A statistical approach to detect cheating interviewers

Sebastian Bredl, Peter Winker and Kerstin Kötschau

No 39, Discussion Papers from Justus Liebig University Giessen, Center for international Development and Environmental Research (ZEU)

Abstract: Survey data are potentially affected by cheating interviewers. Even a small number of fabricated interviews might seriously impair the results of further empirical analysis. Besides reinterviews some statistical approaches have been proposed for identifying fabrication of interviews. As a novel toolin this context, cluster and discriminant analysis are used. Several indicators are combined to classify 'at risk' interviewers based solely on the collected data. An application to a dataset with known cases of cheating interviewers demonstrates that the methods are able to identify the cheating interviewers with a high probability. The multivariate classiffication is superior to the application of a singleindicator such as Benford's law.

Keywords: cheating interviewers; Benford's law; cluster analysis; data fabrication (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/39808/1/593464877.pdf (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:zbw:zeudps:39

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers from Justus Liebig University Giessen, Center for international Development and Environmental Research (ZEU) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().