Hi Wisanupong,

What a great question!

I used the Social Desirability scale from the MMPI and as you said, it is too long.

I wanted to see if social desirability was more related to responses made by caregivers of spouses with Alzheimer's disease than non-caregivers (persons who had spouses who did not have AD and were not caregivers). I had not done anything with the SD scale for a long time, but recently examined it to see if SD was related to hours reported caregiving, depression, etc. I found that SD influenced relationships of hours of care and depression in caregivers whereby the higher the SD, the lower the correlation of hours of care and depression. I did not control for other factors such as age, gender, etc. but this summer I intend to work on this. When I do this, I will do some psychometric analyses on the SD items, including Factor Analyses/principal components and reliabilities to see which items are kernel items. I will be happy to share this with you and perhaps you can collaborate with us. I am also interested in how stress and SD are related. If we come up with a 2-3 item version, perhaps you could test it in your country with other samples?

I have a heavy teaching load this quarter or I would do this sooner.

Take care

Professor Peter, thank you so much. Yes, I would be more than happy to test it in the Thai sample. My email address is [email protected].

In terms of my paper, though, do you think I should use the one-item measure that I came up with? I am just not sure how reviewers will react to this. Thank you.

I am leery of one-item measures. I wrote a piece for the J of Psychosomatic Research on a one-item measure of "being treated unfairly". It was in response to a very large study on civil servants workers in Britain that looked at relationships of unfairness and the Metabolic Syndrome.

The one item measures that have been used extensively in the literature are those for self-rated health, self-rated pain, self-rated functioning. These have lots of data to support them (although I have always been concerned that self-rated health should only be used as a screen because it is non-specific. It is very sensitive, but it is related to so many things, it is difficult to know why).

There is no reason why you can not use your SD item as an exploratory measure. Some day you could obtain data on established measures of SD and then relate their items to your one-item measure.

For now, I recommend that you look at the content and construct validity of standard SD measures and logically compare your item to the items on these standard measures. What are the core themes of SD, what does your item tap into?

If you want to use your measure now, you can bolster its appeal by the logical methods above prior to getting simultaneous data on your measure and other SD measures.

BTW, what is your item?

Best

I do appreciate your reply. The item is "How I am perceived by others is very important to me." 

Thank you so much Professor Peter. I do appreciate your great insights. I will go ahead and mention this measure in my paper, acknowledging that this approach is entirely exploratory.

I think that, for future research, it would be great to have 3-4 item measure. Such scale has at least 'statistical' advantage over 2-item scale: (a) you can measure Cronbach's alpha for it; (b) in cross-group (esp. cross-cultural) research you can look for partial invariance.

If there is no such method already (or, at least, no very wide-spread and well-known), then constructing it would grant you a lot of citations. I, for example, would use it in few research

Thank you very much. 

http://ejop.psychopen.eu/article/view/417/html

This might help.