Topics where socially desirable responding (SDR) is of special concern are self-reports of abilities, personality, sexual behavior, and drug use.
Individual differences in SDR make it difficult to distinguish those people with good traits who are responding factually from those distorting their answers in a positive direction.
After all, people actually differ in the degree to which they possess desirable traits (e.g. nuns versus criminals).
[17] In 1991, Delroy L. Paulhus published the Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding (BIDR): a questionnaire designed to measure two forms of SDR.
"[19] Scales designed to tap response styles are available in all major languages, including Italian[20][21] and German.
[23] In anonymous survey settings, the subject is assured that their responses will not be linked to them, and they are not asked to divulge sensitive information directly to a surveyor.
[1] Several techniques have been established to reduce bias when asking questions sensitive to social desirability.
The interviewer has no knowledge of what is recorded on the secret ballot and does not have access to the lock on the box, providing obscurity to the responses and limiting the potential for SDB.
However, a unique control number on each ballot allows the answers to be reunited with a corresponding questionnaire that contains less sensitive questions.
[26][27] The BBM has been used successfully to obtain estimates of sensitive sexual behaviours during an HIV prevention study,[26] as well as illegal environmental resource use.
This enables the researcher to estimate the actual prevalence of the given behavior among the study population without needing to know the true state of any one individual respondent.
[29] Validation research has shown that the RRT actually performs worse than direct questioning for some sensitive behaviours and care should be taken when considering its use.
While this can raise ethical questions surrounding deception in psychological research, this technique quickly became widely popular in the 1970s.
Interested in this change, Roese and Jamison (1993) took twenty years of research to do a meta-analysis on the effectiveness of the Bogus pipeline technique in reducing social desirability bias.
They concluded that while the Bogus pipeline technique was significantly effective, it had perhaps become less used simply because it went out of fashion, or became cumbersome for researchers to use regularly.
However, Roese and Jamison argued that there are simple adjustments that can be made to this technique to make it more user-friendly for researchers.