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Sensitive Questions and Trust: Explaining Respondents’ Behavior in Randomized Response Surveys

The randomized response technique (RRT) is an indirect question method that uses stochastic noise to increase anonymity in surveys containing sensitive items. Former studies often implicitly assumed that the respondents trust and comply with the RRT procedure and, therefore, are motivated to give truthful responses. However, validation studies demonstrated that RRT may not always be successful in eliciting truthful answering—even when compared with direct questioning. The article theoretically explores and discusses the conditions under which this assumption is consistent (or inconsistent) with the survey respondents’ rational behavior. First, because P(A| Yes) > P(A| No), both types of respondents, A (with sensitive trait) and non-A (without sensitive trait), have an incentive to disregard the instructions in the RRT mode. In contrast, respondents type non-A have no incentive to lie in the direct questioning mode. Thus, the potential for social desirability bias is (theoretically) higher in the RRT mode. Second, a basic game theoretic approach conceptualizes the survey interview as a social interaction between the respondent and the interviewer within the context of norms and mutual expectations. It is argued that the respondent’s choice to answer truthfully depends on (a) the respondents’ estimated likelihood that the interviewer honors trust and (b) a relative comparison of the utility from conforming to “the norm of truthfulness” versus its costs. Finally, we review previous empirical evidence and show that our theoretical model can explain both successes and failures of the RRT.