In this paper we propose a strategy for administering a survey that is mindful of sensitive data and individual privacy. The survey in question seeks to estimate the population proportions of a sensitive, polychotomous variable and does not depend on anonymity, cryptography, or in legal guarantees for its privacy preserving properties. Our technique, called Negative Surveys, presents interviewe...

Gaining valid answers to so-called sensitive questions is an age-old problem in survey research. Various techniques have been developed to guarantee anonymity and minimize the respondent’s feelings of jeopardy. Two such techniques are the randomized response technique (RRT) and the unmatched count technique (UCT). In this study we evaluate the effectiveness of different implementations of the R...

Surveys often contain sensitive questions, i. e., questions about private, illegal, or socially undesirable behavior. When asked directly in standard survey formats, respondents tend to underreport these behaviors, yielding biased results. One method that promises more valid estimates than direct questioning (DQ) is the item count technique (ICT). In this paper, the methodological pros and cons...

Randomized response techniques (RRTs) aim to reduce social desirability bias in the assessment of sensitive attributes but differ regarding privacy protection. The less protection a design offers, the more likely respondents cheat by disobeying the instructions. In asymmetric RRT designs, respondents can play safe by giving a response that is never associated with the sensitive attribute. Symme...

This article focuses on the estimation of population proportion when the study variable is sensitive in nature. Two implicit randomized response techniques are proposed where the unrelated trait can be chosen subjectively. In addition to unbiased estimation of population proportion and variance, an empirical study is conducted to inspect the relative efficiency facet of the proposed techniques....

The paper formalizes Warner’s (1965) randomized response technique (RRT) as a game and implements it experimentally, thus linking game theoretic approaches to randomness in communication with survey practice in the field and a novel implementation in the lab. As predicted by our model and in line with Warner, the frequency of truthful responses is significantly higher with randomization than wi...