Online Survey on "Exams and Written Papers". Documentation

In spring 2011, the students of the University of Bern and ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) in Switzerland were invited to participate in an online survey called "Exams and written papers" ("Prüfungen und schriftliche Arbeiten an der Universität Bern" at the University of Bern and "Prüfungen und schriftliche Arbeiten an der ETH Zürich" at the ETH Zurich). The goal of the survey was to estimate the prevalence of various forms of student misconduct such as plagiarizing or cheating in exams. Because students might be reluctant to reveal information on such behaviors, special techniques for sensitive questions were employed in addition to direct questioning. Respondents were randomly assigned to direct questioning or one of five different sensitive question techniques. A comparison of the techniques' results indicates whether direct questioning is affected by social desirability bias and whether students are more inclined to provide honest answers if interviewed by so-called dejeopardizing questioning techniques. Sensitive question techniques evaluated in this survey are three different implementations of the Randomized Response Technique as well as two variants of the recently proposed Crosswise Model. Since the survey was conducted via the internet, special effort was put into developing implementations of the RRT and the CM suitable for self-administered online interviews. This document describes the design of the survey and the questionnaire and provides details on the different implementations of the RRT and the CM, the field work, and the resulting dataset. The appendix contains a codebook of the data and facsimiles of the questionnaire pages and other survey materials.