Item-pair measures of acquiescence: the artificial inflation of socially desirable responding

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the role of socially desirable responding in an item-pair measure of acquiescence from the Big Five Inventory. If both items in an item-pair have desirable content, the likelihood of agreeing with both items is increased, and consequently, the type of responding that would be taken to indicate acquiescence. In Study I, item content desirability was evaluated for each of the 32 items belonging to the item-pairs in two samples of 214 and 68 university students. The item-pair desirability was then correlated with the percentage of respondents who agreed with both items in a separate sample of 895 students. Results showed a substantial correlation between item-pairs’ desirability and the percentage of estimated acquiescence, indicating an inflation of acquiescence when item-pairs have desirable content. The finding was further supported by Study II, in which acquiescence and item difficulty, assessed with cognitive interviews, were unrelated.

KEYWORDS:

• Socially desirable responding
• acquiescence
• Big Five Inventory (BFI)
• response bias

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Vaka Vésteinsdóttir

Vaka Vésteinsdóttir is an adjunct professor of Psychology, at the University of Iceland, School of Health Sciences, project manager at the School of Health Sciences’ Testing Center and director of RAHÍ Methodology Research Center. She obtained her BA and MA degrees at the University of Iceland on the topics of telephone interviewers’ voice and acceptance rates, and honesty testing. After receiving her PhD in psychological methodology from the University of Iceland she was postdoc in the Psychological Methods, Assessment and iScience team at the University of Konstanz. Her research interests are in survey methodology, particularly in questionnaire construction and measurement bias, with a focus on socially desirable responding.

Ragnhildur Lilja Asgeirsdottir

Ragnhildur Lilja Asgeirsdottir is a PhD student in Quantitative Psychology at the University of Iceland, Department of Psychology. She obtained her Bachelor and Masters degrees at the University of Iceland. Her research interests are in the areas of survey methodology and psychometrics, particularly in questionnaire construction and measurement bias.

Ulf-Dietrich Reips

Ulf-Dietrich Reips is a full professor in the Faculty of Sciences at the University of Konstanz, where he holds the Chair for Psychological Methods, Assessment, and iScience. For more than two decades he has been working on Internet-based research methodologies (or Internet science), the psychology of the Internet, measurement, development, the cognition of causality, personality, privacy, Social Media, crowdsourcing, and Big Data. In 1994, he founded the Web Experimental Psychology Lab, the first laboratory for conducting real experiments on the World Wide Web. Ulf was elected the first non-North American president of the Society for Computers in Psychology (SCiP) and he is the founding editor of the International Journal of Internet Science. Many of his over 140 publications are among the most highly cited in their journals, see http://www.uni-konstanz.de/iscience/reips/pubs/publications.html. Ulf has worked, lived, and studied in California, Colorado, Israel, Germany, Spain, Switzerland, and the UK. In 2014, he was ranked 7th of ‘Top Scientists working at Spanish Private Universities’ by the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, Spain. Recently, he has been asked to direct the Leibniz institute for Psychology information in Trier, Germany. Ulf and his team develop and provide free Web tools for researchers, teachers, students, and the public. They received numerous awards for their Web applications (available from the iScience Server at http://iscience.eu/) and methodological work serving the research community.

Fanney Thorsdottir

Fanney Thorsdottir is an associate professor of Psychology at the University of Iceland, School of Health Sciences and co-founder of RAHÍ Methodology Research Center. She has a BA and a Master (Psychology) from the University of Iceland, a Diploma in Social Science Data Analysis from the University of Essex and a PhD (psychology) from the London School of Economics. Her research interests are in the areas of psychometrics and survey methodology with a particular focus on measurement bias in self-report measurements.