Replication Data for: An Empirical Validation Study of Popular Survey Methodologies for Sensitive Questions

When studying sensitive issues including corruption, prejudice, and sexual behavior, researchers have increasingly relied upon indirect questioning techniques to mitigate such known problems of direct survey questions as under-reporting and nonresponse. However, there have been surprisingly few empirical validation studies of these indirect techniques, because the information required to verify the resulting estimates is often difficult to access. This paper reports findings from the first comprehensive validation study of indirect methods. We estimate whether people voted for an anti-abortion referendum held during the 2011 Mississippi General Election using direct questioning and three popular indirect methods: list experiment, endorsement experiment, and randomized response. We then validate these estimates against the official election outcome. While direct questioning leads to significant under-estimation of sensitive votes against the referendum, these survey techniques yield estimates much closer to the actual vote count, with endorsement experiment and randomized response yielding least bias.

在研究腐败、偏见、性行为等敏感议题时，研究者愈发依赖间接提问技术，以规避直接调查提问方式已知的漏报与无应答等问题。然而，针对此类间接提问技术的实证验证研究却寥寥无几，这是因为验证估算结果所需的相关信息往往难以获取。本研究报告了首个针对间接提问方法的综合性验证研究成果。本研究采用直接提问法与三种主流间接提问方法：列表实验（list experiment）、背书实验（endorsement experiment）以及随机应答技术（randomized response），对2011年密西西比州大选期间举行的反堕胎公投的选民支持情况进行估算。随后将上述估算结果与官方选举结果进行对照验证。研究发现，尽管直接提问法会显著低估对公投持反对态度的敏感投票率，但上述调查技术得出的估算结果均更贴近实际投票数，其中背书实验与随机应答技术的偏差最小。