Automatie Identification of Faked and Fraudulent Interviews in the German SOEP

Based on data frorn the German Socio-Econornic Panel (SOEP), this paper presents two new tools for the identification of faked interviews in surveys. One rnethod is based on Benford's Law, and the other exploits the ernpirical observation that fakers most often produce answers with less variability than could be expected frorn the whole survey. We focus on fabricated data, which was taken out of the survey before the data was disserninated to extemal users. For two sarnples, the resulting rankings of the interviewers with respect to their cheating behavior are given. For both rnethods all of the evident fakers are identified