The Validity of Randomized Response for Sensitive Measurements

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

“…Similar studies on abortion rates have been conducted in North Carolina (Abernathy, Greenberg, and Horvitz 1970), Mexico (Lara et al 2004(Lara et al , 2006, and Turkey (Tezcan and Omran 1981). Other applications of the unrelated question include a criminology study of self-reported arrests in Philadelphia (Tracy and Fox 1981), a sociological assessment concerning the conDownloaded by [Princeton University] at 04:56 08 November 2015 cealment of deaths in the household from local authorities in the Philippines (Madigan et al 1976), and self-reported failure of classes by college students (Lamb and Stem 1978).…”

“…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.…”

“…The dearth of substantive applications is unfortunate because there exists empirical evidence that the randomized response method is an effective technique for studying sensitive topics at least in some settings (e.g., Tracy and Fox 1981;van der Heijden et al 2000;Lara et al 2004;Rosenfeld, Imai, and Shapiro 2015;Stubbe et al 2014). Some researchers find that not only does randomized response lead to the lowest response distortion compared to other indirect questioning methods, but also it is generally well received by both interviewers and respondents (e.g., Locander, Sudman, and Bradburn 1976).…”

Bayesian randomized item response modeling for sensitive measurements

“…Most randomizing devices are not without problems (Tracy & Fox, 1981). For instance, to reproduce the required design probabilities a deck has to be adequately shuffled.…”

“…Fox and Wyrick (2008) measured the prevalence of alcohol use, and alcohol-related problems among college students. Rates of academic cheating and rates of criminal behavior were investigated by Tracy and Fox (1981) and Scheers and Dayton (1988), respectively. The prevalence of academic cheating, tax evasion, and software piracy, among others, have been discussed by Lensvelt-Mulders, Hox, van der Heijden, and Maas (2005); Lensvelt-Mulders, Hox, and van der Heijden (2005) and van der Heijden et al (2000).…”