Department of Population, Family and Reproductive Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, MD, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2021 Jun 7;16(6):e0252512. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0252512. eCollection 2021.
Survey researchers hope that respondents will provide high-quality data, but evidence suggests that social desirability bias may be commonplace. Social desirability can lead to significant underreporting or overreporting of sensitive behaviors. With better understanding of the cognitive processes that respondents use to prepare and deliver their responses, survey designers could hope to minimize social desirability bias or at least detect settings that lessen its impact. The primary objective of this study was to use survey paradata to understand the psychology of responding to certain types of survey questions. More specifically, we sought to determine how emotional triggering can alter response latencies to cognitively demanding and sensitive survey questions on induced abortion, which is underreported. We hypothesize that having had a prior abortion might lengthen response times to an indirect question about abortion among respondents who have experienced this sensitive reproductive outcome as they hesitate in deciding whether and how to respond to the question. Data come from a representative survey of 6,035 reproductive age women in Rajasthan, India. We used list experiment question active screen time paradata in conjunction with responses from direct questions on abortion to assess our hypothesis. Our final model was a multivariate linear regression with random effects at the level of the interviewer, including adjustments for respondent, community, and interviewer characteristics to estimate within-respondent effects. Results suggest that women who reported an abortion on the direct abortion questions took 5.11 (95% CI 0.21, 10.00) seconds longer to respond to the list experiment treatment list compared to the control list in comparison to women who did not report an abortion on the direct abortion questions. This study demonstrates the additional insights gained when focusing on response latencies to cognitively demanding questions involved in the measurement of sensitive behaviors.
调查研究人员希望受访者提供高质量的数据，但有证据表明，社会期望偏差可能很常见。社会期望偏差可能导致对敏感行为的显著少报或多报。通过更好地理解受访者用来准备和提供回答的认知过程，调查设计者可以希望最大限度地减少社会期望偏差，或者至少发现可以减轻其影响的环境。本研究的主要目的是使用调查副数据来了解对某些类型的调查问题作出回应的心理。更具体地说，我们试图确定情绪触发如何改变对认知要求高和敏感的人工流产调查问题的反应时，人工流产的报告率较低。我们假设，对于经历过这种敏感生殖结果的人来说，他们在决定是否以及如何回答问题时犹豫不决，先前有过堕胎可能会延长他们对间接询问堕胎问题的反应时间。数据来自印度拉贾斯坦邦对 6035 名育龄妇女的代表性调查。我们使用列表实验问题主动屏幕时间副数据结合关于堕胎的直接问题的回答来评估我们的假设。我们的最终模型是一个具有随机效应的多元线性回归，在访谈者一级包括对受访者、社区和访谈者特征的调整，以估计受访者内的效应。结果表明，与没有在直接堕胎问题上报告堕胎的女性相比，在直接堕胎问题上报告堕胎的女性对列表实验处理列表的反应时间延长了 5.11 秒（95%CI0.21,10.00），而对控制列表的反应时间则没有延长。这项研究表明，当关注涉及敏感行为测量的认知要求高的问题的反应时，会获得更多的见解。
