This article is an empirical contribution to the evaluation of the randomized response technique (RRT), a prominent procedure to elicit more valid responses to sensitive questions in surveys. Based on individual validation data, we focus on two questions: First, does the RRT lead to higher...

Surveys are widely used by scholars, companies, and public policymakers to generate invaluable insights. Despite the popularity of surveys, there are several biases that can affect the validity of self-reported data. In his inaugural address, Martijn de Jong discusses how new survey methods can...

Item count techniques (ICTs) are indirect survey questioning methods designed to deal with sensitive features. These techniques have gained the support of many applied researchers and undergone further theoretical development. Latterly in the literature, two new item count methods, called...

Several small-sample studies have predicted that a citizenship question in the 2020 Census would cause a large drop in self-response rates. In contrast, minimal effects were found in Poehler et al.'s (2020) analysis of the 2019 Census Test randomized controlled trial (RCT). We reconcile these...

The self-response rate is a key driver of the cost and quality of a census. The addition of a citizenship question to the 2020 Census could affect the self-response rate. We predict the effect of the addition of a citizenship question on self-response by comparing mail response rates in the 2010...

Drawing on data from a nation-wide survey on the fairness of earnings, this piece of work examines the susceptibility of factorial survey experiments to mode effects. It uses multilevel models to compare the results from a completely self-administered questionnaire to those of an experimental...

Summary This article evaluates three different questioning techniques for measuring the prevalence of plagiarism in student papers: the randomized response technique (RRT), the item count technique (ICT), and the crosswise model (CM). In three independent experimental surveys with Swiss and...

In this article, “Benford’s law†is applied to the “randomized response technique†(RRT) to increase the validity of answers to sensitive questions. Using the Newcomb–Benford distribution as a randomizing device has several advantages. It is easy to explain and...

Due to its sensitive nature, tax compliance is difficult to study empirically, and valid information on tax evasion is rare. More specifically, when directly asked on surveys, respondents are likely to underreport their evasion behavior. Such invalid responses not only bias prevalence estimates...

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...