Recently I've been reviewing how to handle social desirability in testing.
After much theoretical review I have come to the conclusion that the best way to do this is to neutralize the items from social desirability. The format I will use is likert scale.
For example, an item that says "I fight with my coworkers" would be transformed into " sometimes I react strongly to my coworkers" (the second is somewhat more neutral).
The idea comes from the work done by Professor Martin Bäckström.
Now the question I have is: is there any methodology that can help make this neutralization?
If not, what would be good ideas to realize it? What elements should I consider?
I think a good idea might be to "depersonalize" the item. For example, instead of "I fight with my bosses," I would become "I think an employee has the right to fight with his or her boss".
Another option I've thought of is to modify the frequency. For example, instead of "I get angry easily," I'd use "Sometimes I get angry easily."
However, I do not know if these options would affect the validity of the item to measure the construct.
Thank you so much for the help.
so far my information about item writing is concerned, i think sometimes we try to neutralize the items so much that they lose the actual meaning or content.......to avoid such problem the ideal is that items should be kept same in content but at the time of scoring, these items need to scored reversely...
There is a pretty straightforward methodology for accomplishing this goal. It will require you to run 1-2 pilot studies, but can be folded into other pilot research (i.e., it doesn't necessarily mean you need additional samples).
First, as you guessed, you need to try to write items that don't have an obviously socially desirable response. As always, you should write more items than you will actually need, because some of them won't "work" for one reason or another. The old guideline is to write about twice as many as you'll want.
Then you check to see how strongly influenced they are by social desirability. (By the way, research pertaining to Defensiveness or Impression Management is basically synonymous with Social Desirability. Just different ways of defining what's going on; the scales are essentially identical.)
The way to do this is to administer your draft test to a sample of people along with a social desirability scale (such as the Marlowe-Crowne).
Now you calculate two figures for each item: its correlation with the remainder of your scale (corrected item-total correlation; you can get this when you run a reliability analysis in most statistical packages) and its correlation with social desirability. Any item that correlates more strongly with social desirability than with the remainder of the scale should be discarded.
Don't worry about the possibility that your scale will still correlate with social desirability. That may be a true finding about the variable you're interested in. Social desirability isn't just a response bias; it influences behavior in multiple contexts.
You may also include a scale that can be used to validate your items/measure. For example, if you're assessing people's displays of anger at work, you might choose the State-Trait Anger Expression Inventory. Then you calculate the correlations between each item on your test and the STAXI score. This helps you to select items that are valid for the stated purpose.
One option, but one that would be difficult and time consuming (and probably inappropriate), would be to use the 'bogus pipeline'. The study below describes how participants were wired up to a very fancy polygraph-like machine (which was bogus) to try and reduce social desirability. I'm not sure it would get past an ethics committee now!
Article Is the relationship between religiosity and personality ‘con...
Ale Jo by reverse scoring you have to score the positive or favoring items from backward on the five or 7 point likert scale......
E.G., WE USUALLY DO SCORING AS 1(STRONGLY DISAGREE), 2,3,4,5(STRONGLY AGREE) IN CASE OF NEGATIVE ITEMS WE DO 5(STRONGLY DISAGREE), 4,3,2,1(STRONGLY AGREE)
This problem is something i try to solve in my study about developing spiritual serenity scale... In first study, i found the desirability of the items.. Rasch model analyze found that the items below of respondents ability...
In the next study, i will try change the descriptors of items to be more difficult... For example, never, seldom, sometimes, often, very often, and always..
Options "often", "very often" , and always will be chosed by persons only with high ability...
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Psychology
- Psychometrics