The impact of anonymity on responses to sensitive questions

To estimate frequencies of behaviors not carried out in public view, researchers generally must rely on self-report data. We explored 2 factors expected to influence the decision to reveal: (a) privacy (anonymity vs. confidentiality) and (b) normalization (providing infor-mation so that a behavior is reputedly commonplace or rare). We administered a question-naire to I55 undergraduates. For 79 respondents, we had corroborative information regarding a negative behavior: cheating. The privacy variable had an enormous impact; of those who had cheated, 25 % acknowledged having done so under confidentiality, but 74% admitted the behavior under anonymity. Normalization had no effect. There were also dra-matic differences between anonymity and confidentiality on some o f our other questions, for which we did not have validation. Perhaps the most fundamental issue in survey research is that posed in the title of Hyman’s (1944) paper, “Do they tell the truth? ’ The quality of question-naire data is especially worrisome when the behavior in question is likely to be viewed as embarrassing or sensitive (Armacost, Hosseini, Morris, & Rehbein