Abstract
Social desirability seems to enhance well-being measures because individuals tend to increase the degree of their satisfaction and happiness resulting in response artifacts and in a serious threat to the validity of self-reported data. This paper explores social desirability bias in self-reported subjective well-being, controlling for several socio-demographic variables such as gender, age, education, marital/relationship status and employment status. This is in order to test whether social desirability has incremental validity in predicting some well-being measures. Three different facets of well-being are proposed which deal with subjective happiness, general life satisfaction, and gratitude and loneliness, respectively regarded as a positive and negative emotional response. Through a web-based survey a convenience sample of 170 participants completed an online questionnaire including measures of social desirability, subjective happiness, life satisfaction, gratitude and loneliness. Correlation analyses and two-step hierarchical multiple regression analyses were conducted. All well-being measures show modest significant correlations with social desirability ranging from .235 to .309, except subjective happiness. Social desirability accounted for from about 3% to 6% of the variance of these measures, after controlling for socio-demographic variables. Social desirability seems thus to play little role in well-being self-report measures, as revealed by previous studies. Some limitations are discussed, as well as issues about social desirability bias in online investigation.
Highlights
Social desirab ility seems to enhance well-b eing measures because individuals tend to increase the degree of their satisfaction and happiness resulting in response artifacts and in a serious threat to the validity of self-reported data
The results of hierarchical multiple regression analyses (Table 3) indicated that sociodemographic variables together accounted for 9.7% of the variance of subjective happiness, 10.1% of life satisfaction, 12.8% of gratitude, and 16.9% of loneliness
Our study confirms the lack of correlation between social desirability and subjective happiness, as emerged in other studies (Veenhoven, 1991) which did not find any problem of social desirability bias in literature reviews on happiness measures
Summary
Social desirab ility seems to enhance well-b eing measures because individuals tend to increase the degree of their satisfaction and happiness resulting in response artifacts and in a serious threat to the validity of self-reported data. Social desirability refers to the individual’s tendency to respond in a more socially desirab le manner in certain situations (Richman, Weisb and, Kiesler, & Drasgow, 1999) and reflects what one believes will lead to approval from others or avoiding their disapproval (Crowne & Marlowe, 1960) It is typically characterized by the tendency of respondents using self-report questionnaires to answer in such a way as to make themselves look good, to give positive self-descriptions, often at the expense of honesty and/or accuracy (Holtgraves, 2004; Paulhus, 2002). It is common for societies to emphasize that their members act in an agreeable and pleasant manner, even when an individual is experiencing a negative mood or an adverse situation (Eysenck, 1990) In this sense, social desirability seems to enhance wellbeing (McCrae, 2002), because individuals tend to increase the degree of their satisfaction and happiness through their self-reports resulting in response artifacts (Penezić & Ivanov, 1999).
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