Social Desirability Bias - Essay Example

Biasness is one sided in general and lacks neutral view point. Bias may be present in many forms. It is often treated as the synonyms to bigotry or prejudice (Kothari, 2007, p. 131). Social desirability bias Social desirability bias can be defined as the propensity of the respondents to answer to questions in such a fashion that is likely to be viewed as favourable by others. The respondent may exhibit Social desirability bias by over emphasizing on the good behaviour or under emphasizing on the bad behaviour.

Therefore SDR poses a serious problem while conducting research work. Some of the research topics in which SDR is a real concern are personality, sexual behaviour, personal income, religion, drug use, self with, patriotism, and charity. People usually differ in the propensity in indulge in a socially desirable responding happens to be a real course of concern for the researcher. It literally makes it impossible for the researcher to distinguish between people responding in a more truthful of factual manner as compared to those deforming the answers (Bhattacharya, 2009, p. 201). Impact of bias on research Research or survey is by far the most useful and widely used way to study the behaviour of donors when it comes to charitable giving.

However, the quality of the data is much known. It is believed that the donors are quite notorious when it comes to less accurate reporting of funds. Some may argue that it may happen due to the poor memory of the respondents. However, experts believe that it very well could be a deliberate effort made by the respondents to pump up the giving to appear a bit more generous than actual. Therefore it is not a surprise to the researchers to find out evidences of vast amount of discrepancies in charity giving studies during the similar time span.

Examples of such discrepancies could be: total value of charitable giving not matching the level of income. Add to this the charity giving trends have also believed to be contradictory with one another. In the context of charitable giving the people usually want to sound a bit more socially orientated and altruistic than the actual. While responding to the questions of specific domain respondents bias the responses leading to social desirability. In case of charity it could be done to enhance the social image or to avoid any kind of embarrassment.

Therefore if appropriate actions are not taken SDB is likely to contaminate the findings and affect decision making. After reviewing previous SDB researches, experts have found out two important loop holes. SDB is quite faintly conceptualized. In order to counter this issue some SD scales had been developed. However, without clear accord, it is difficult for researchers to select suitable social desirability scales. Many researchers have also indicated that the respondents misreporting are mainly coupled with differences in personality.

The desire of the respondent to over report regarding charitable donations could be different from the other different socially desirable behaviours like recycling or voting (Goswami, 2010, p. 225). Some Measures to Reduce SDB SBBM SBBM has been found to be quite effective in minimizing the social desirability bias. In case of this method the interviewer reads out the questions from a questionnaire and respondents answer through a secret voting procedure using ballot box or slips. SBBM is a portable lightweight wooden box.

It has a slot similar to the ballot box. The ballot slips are strips of papers with cross reference with the questionnaire. The interviewer reads the questions one at a time and the respondents put a circle in the voting slip. At the completion of the