A discussion of the two different aspects of privacy protection in indirect questioning designs

Andreas Quatember

doi:10.1007/s11135-018-0751-4

Abstract

The motivation behind considering the use of indirect questioning designs is their possible positive effect on the respondents’ willingness to cooperate. Whereas the privacy protection objectively offered by these methods has a direct effect on the estimator’s efficiency, it is the subjectively perceived protection which affects the respondents’ willingness to cooperate. For the discussion of these different aspects of privacy protection, a family of randomized response techniques enabling the tailoring of the design’s privacy protection to the respondents is presented as representative of indirect questioning designs. Measures are suggested that formalize how the objectively offered and subjectively perceived privacy protection may differ. Different features of randomized response questioning designs, influencing the perceived privacy protection, are discussed particularly for the “crosswise model” in order to avoid underestimations of the true levels of privacy protection, which would be counter-productive with regard to the respondents’ cooperation propensity.

Highlights

When questions on different sensitive subjects, such as income, voting behaviour, sexual orientation, alcoholism, drug usage, poverty, illegal employment, tax evasion, harassment at work, domestic violence, abortion, academic cheating, doping of amateurs and professionals, are asked in surveys using the usual direct-questioning method, the rates ofA
If the direct questioning on the sensitive variable leads to non-ignorable nonresponse and untruthful answers, as very often expected in statistical surveys on sensitive subjects, a considerably biased estimator might be the consequence
It is evident that the overall performance of the exemplarily discussed standardized randomized response (RR) strategy for the estimation of proportions of sensitive behaviour in terms of estimation accuracy and avoidance of nonresponse and untruthful answering is a function of the level of privacy it offers to the respondents, which can be considered from the points of view of an objectively measureable and a subjectively perceived protection

Summary

Introduction

When questions on different sensitive subjects, such as income, voting behaviour, sexual orientation, alcoholism, drug usage, poverty, illegal employment, tax evasion, harassment at work, domestic violence, abortion, academic cheating, doping of amateurs and professionals, are asked in surveys using the usual direct-questioning method, the rates of. 8.5 and 8.6), but not for the untrue answers, which are held for the true answers In contrast to these methods, indirect questioning designs such as the randomized response (RR) techniques discussed or the item-count technique (cf Chaudhuri and Christofides 2013), aim to address both problems at the same time before they occur. These methods can be seen as part of the system of preventative action with respect to nonresponse and untruthful answering, which includes so different things such as persuasion letters, data collection mode, interviewers’ training or the offering of incentives (cf Groves et al 2004, Sec. 6.7). The impact of differing subjective and objective privacy protection on the interviewees’ willingness to reply presuming a reasonably chosen level of objective privacy protection is discussed in particular for the crosswise model implementation of Warner’s technique (1965) by Yu et al (2008)

Randomized response questioning designs

Objectively calculated privacy protection versus accuracy

Subjectively perceived privacy protection versus response propensity

Findings

Conclusion