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Web Survey Bibliography

Title Scaling Social Desirability: Establishing its Influence Across Modes
Year 2007
Access date 28.05.2007
Abstract

A previous study (Taylor, Krane, Thomas, 2004, AAPOR) demonstrated social desirability effects in parallel nationwide phone and online surveys. In the study we report! here, we wanted to develop possible measures to better scale items in terms of social desirability - we wanted to not only determine the direction of difference that we might obtain between modes a priori, but also the degree of difference as a result of the influence of social desirability. We were also interested in how response format could influence the extent of social desirability exhibited. We administered parallel online and phone surveys, respondents in the phone survey were randomly assigned to 1 of 2 conditions - either being asked whether or how often they had engaged in a series of behaviors in the past 30 days. Respondents in the online survey were randomly assigned to 1 of 4 groups, the first 2 being the conditions from the phone survey or to 1 of 2 rating conditions: rate how good or bad the behavior was or rate the behavior in terms if it would create a good Impression or bad impression. Following these sections, we asked respondents in both modes a series of questions designed to assess a respondents tendency to be concerned with social impression management. As we found in our earlier study, phone respondents appeared more susceptible to social desirability responding- In addition, the attempt to scale social desirability met with some success, and our measures of impression management also appeared to improve our understanding of the extent of social desirability responding that we observed.

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Year of publication2007
Bibliographic typeConferences, workshops, tutorials, presentations
Full text availabilityAvailable on request
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Web survey bibliography - The American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) 62th Annual Conference, 2007 (1)