SOCIAL DESIRABILITY BIAS

Social Desirability Bias

Social Desirability Bias

Introduction

The aim of personality assessment is to acquire an accurate description of one or more of an individual's attributes. The most commonly used method of personality assessment is the self-report inventory, in which respondents get presented with statements describing personality characteristics and asked to indicate the ones that can be attributed to them. At the end of collecting these attributes, the result is a description of the person. When personality assessment relies on a self-report inventory, however, the accuracy of the resulting description of the person can be questionable. In particular, individuals taking the inventory may exhibit a response style, that is, a tendency to make attributions about themselves that are systematically biased in some way. In this task, there is a need to advise some researchers employed by the university who are undertaking a study of how much time a diverse group of post graduate master's students spent on academic work each week and what they do at this time. Therefore, the role of Social Desirability Bias in this case will be discussed in detail.

Discussion

Social Desirability Bias is one form of response style that has received substantial attention from researchers during the past 60 years. SDB may be defined as a tendency to endorse personality inventory items, judged to be socially acceptable, and, avoid endorsing items, judged to be socially undesirable. Personality questionnaire items, shown to lie on a continuum of Social Desirability Bias. Items that describe socially desirable characteristics, said to be high on the SDB continuum, whereas items that describe socially undesirable characteristics, said to be low on SDB. According to the researcher known as Paulhus in 1985, there is a general tendency, for individuals, to over-state their positive attributes on self report inventories in order to appear better than they are (Costa, 1992, 71).

In a classic study by the researcher known as Edwards in 1953, the relationship between the probability of endorsement of personality trait items, and, the social desirability of those items was assessed. During the first part of the study, respondents rated a set of personality trait statements for their degree of social desirability. In the second part of the study, another sample of participants were asked to rate themselves on the same personality statements. The instructions indicated that a “yes” response signified that the characteristic, believed to describe the respondent and a “no” response ...