The Randomized Response Technique: A Test on Drug Use

Assessing the validity of two indirect questioning techniques: A Stochastic Lie Detector versus the Crosswise Model

“…Within the last almost 50 years, a large number of RRT models have been developed with various objectives such as improving efficiency (e.g., Boruch, 1971;Dawes & Moore, 1980;Eriksson, 1973;Mangat, 1994;Mangat & Singh, 1990;Moors, 1971), including questions with multicategorical or quantitative answers (e.g., Abul-Ela, Greenberg, & Horvitz, 1967;Himmelfarb & Edgell, 1980;Liu & Chow, 1976;Pollock & Bek, 1976), increasing respondents' cooperation (e.g., Greenberg, Abul-Ela, Simmons, & Horvitz, 1969;Daniel G. Horvitz, Shah, & Simmons, 1967;Kuk, 1990;Ostapczuk, Moshagen, Zhao, & Musch, 2009), and accounting for cheating or noncompliance with the instructions (e.g., Clark & Desharnais, 1998;. The RRT has been applied in surveys covering a variety of sensitive topics such as drug use (Dietz et al, 2013;Goodstadt & Gruson, 1975), doping (James, Nepusz, Naughton, & Petroczi, 2013;Simon, Striegel, Aust, Dietz, & Ulrich, 2006;Striegel, Ulrich, & Simon, 2010), crime (IIT Research Institute and the Chicago Crime Commission, 1971;Wolter & Preisendörfer, 2013), unwed motherhood (Abul-Ela et al, 1967), promiscuity (Liu, Chow, & Mosley, 1975), abortion (Abernathy, Greenberg, & Horvitz, 1970;Greenberg, Kuebler, Abernathy, & Horvitz, 1971), rape (Fidler & Kleinknecht, 1977;Soeken & Damrosch, 1986), homosexuality (Clark & Desharnais, 1998), tax evasion (Edgell, Himmelfarb, & Duchan, 1982), fraud (van der Heijden, van Gils, Bouts, & Hox, 2000), academic cheating (J.-P. …”

Randomized Response Techniques

“…Goodstadt et al [10] reported on a field study of drug usage involving 854 high school students and their drug usage of six separate substances over the preceding 3 months. They found that subjects were significantly more likely to respond to these questions when the RR method was used than with the direct method.…”

E-research – selected issues concerning the Internet attitudes and opinions research

“…This modified design has been used in the literature. The applications include studies of drug use (Goodstadt and Gruson 1975), shoplifting (Reinmuth and Geurts 1975), voting (Locander, Sudman, and Bradburn 1976), and compliance with medication (Volicer and Volicer 1982).…”

“…Indeed, our extensive search yields only a handful of published studies that use the randomized response method to answer substantive questions (Madigan et al 1976;Chaloupka 1985;Wimbush and Dalton 1997;Donovan, Dwight, and Hurtz 2003;St John et al 2012). In contrast, a vast majority of existing studies apply the randomized response method to empirically illustrate its methodological properties by including some substantive examples (e.g., Abernathy, Greenberg, and Horvitz 1970;Chi, Chow, and Rider 1972;Goodstadt and Gruson 1975;Reinmuth and Geurts 1975;Locander, Sudman, and Bradburn 1976;Fidler and Kleinknecht 1977;Lamb and Stem 1978;Tezcan and Omran 1981;Tracy and Fox 1981;Edgell, Himmelfarb, and Duchan 1982;Volicer and Volicer 1982;van der Heijden and van Gils 1996;van der Heijden et al 2000;Elffers, Van Der Heijden, and Hezemans 2003;Lensvelt-Mulders, Hox, and Van Der Heijden 2005a;Lara et al 2006;Cruyff et al 2007;Himmelfarb 2008;De Jong, Pieters, and Fox 2010;Gingerich 2010;Krumpal 2012). This finding is consistent with previous reviews of the literature.…”