“Social desirability” is the defensive tendency of individuals to portray themselves in keeping with perceived cultural norms, whereas “social approval” is the need to obtain a positive response in a testing situation. They are systematic errors in self-reports, how can we estimate their effect?
Dear Rosario,
Check these papers out:
Article Effect of social desirability instructions on several MMPI m...
Thesis The Effect of Social Desirability on Sport Identity and Achi...
Article Eating behavior in Portuguese higher education students: The...
Article Altruism, moral norms and social approval: Joint determinant...
The most common approach for controlling social desirability in questionnaires is through the use of lie scales. However, lie scales in themselves have validity problems. Today, many researchers believe that what lie scales measure is not the tendencies to fake good on questionnaires, but a general facet of personality.
Therefore, it is not quite certain what we are doing when controlling for lie scale scores.
I can recommend these papers;
Uziel, L. (2010). Rethinking Social Desirability scales: From Impression Management to interpersonally oriented self-control. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 5, 243-262.
Smith, D. B., & Ellingson, J. E. (2002). Substance versus style: A new look at social desirability in motivating contexts. Journal of Applied Psychology, 87, 211-219.
Schmitt, N., Oswald, F. L., Kim, B. H., Gillespie, M. A., Ramsay, L. J., & Yoo, T.-Y. (2003). Impact of elaboration on socially desirable responding and validity of biodata measures. Journal of Applied Psychology, 88, 978-988.
Pauls, C. A., & Stemmler, G. (2003). Substance and bias in social desirability responding. Personality and Individual Differences, 35, 263-275.
Moorman, R. H., & Podsakoff, P. M. (1992). A meta-analytic review and empirical test of the potential confounding effects of social desirability response sets in organizational behaviour research. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 65, 131-149.
Holden, R. R. (2007). Socially desirable responding does moderate personality scale validity both in experimental and non-experimental contexts. Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science, 39, 184-201.
af Wåhlberg, A. E., Dorn, L., & Kline, T. (2010). The effect of social desirability on self reported and recorded road traffic accidents. Transportation Research Part F, 13, 106-114.
af Wåhlberg, A. E. (2010). Social desirability effects in driver behavior inventories. Journal of Safety Research, 41, 99-106.
af Wåhlberg, A. E., & Melin, L. (submitted). On the validity of lie scales.
Does your questionnaire contain measures that would make the participants particularly "defensive"? If not, you will certainly have that effect if you ask most of the "lie" scales, which can be highly annoying to participants.
May I interject with a parallel situation that speaks to human behaviours in testing. During the rollout of a new software system, the results of formal usability studies on software where the subjects were in a lab and aware of being observed were almost diametrically opposite to the results gathering by observation in the work place.
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Social Science