CORRECTING FOR SOCIAL DESIRABILITY RESPONSE SETS IN OPINION ATTITUDE SURVEY RESEARCH
For over thirty years psychologists have been concerned with the problem of "distortion" in the way people respond to personality test items. Personality testers at first believed that the responses of subjects to their tests items were direct and unbiased estimates of how these persons actually felt or were. Low predictive validities of the early personality inventories soon convinced them otherwise. Attention then turned to finding out to what degree the subject was "faking good" or lying in his test responses. More recently, investigation of the concept of "response set" a personal tendency to respond in a specified way within a testing or interview situation has replaced the earlier emphasis on frankness versus distortion. For instance, Crowne and Marlowe have recently published an important book describing the results of several studies relating the "social desirability response set" "SD set" or need for approval, to various non questionnaire situations. Using a 33 item questionnaire measure of SD set, these psychologists showed that the need for approval so measured was positively associated with such other variables as conformity, sensitivity to norms and social influence, and cautiousness about revealing oneself or endangering one's self esteem.2 Sociologists inevitably face the problems of response set in survey research on attitudes and opinions, just as psychologists do in their clinical personality testing. In fact, with the growing interest in the interplay between social structure and personality, sociologists are now including in their survey questionnaires ever more items that may be interpreted as measures of personality traits rather than of specific attitudes only.