A new version of the item count technique

Abstract

Traditional survey techniques on human populations are expected to give poor results when the issue under investigation is sensitive or stigmatizing. Various sources of nonsampling error, in particular nonresponse and misleading answers, are serious threats to the validity of the conclusions. Indirect questioning techniques offer a remedy to this problem. Randomized response, introduced by Warner [14], has the lion’s share in indirect questioning, but an alternative, the item count technique, is popular among social scientists. Although the original version introduced by Raghavarao and Federer [10], Miller [8], and Miller et al. [9] is easily understood by respondents and can be incorporated in structured questionnaires, it does not fully protect the privacy of the participants. In this paper, where our main priority will be the protection of privacy, we present a modified version of the item count technique.