Eliciting Information from Sensitive Survey Questions

TL;DR

This paper evaluates existing methods for sensitive survey questions, finds their assumptions often fail, and introduces a new Multiple Response Technique that improves data collection on sensitive topics.

Contribution

The paper critically assesses list experiments and proposes the novel Multiple Response Technique for more accurate sensitive data elicitation.

Findings

List experiments assumptions are frequently violated in practice.

MRT recovers sensitive information despite misreporting.

Application of MRT yields new insights on LGBT-related sentiments.

Abstract

This paper considers how to elicit information from sensitive survey questions. First we thoroughly evaluate list experiments (LE), a leading method in the experimental literature on sensitive questions. Our empirical results demonstrate that the assumptions required to identify sensitive information in LE are violated for the majority of surveys. Next we propose a novel survey method, called Multiple Response Technique (MRT), for eliciting information from sensitive questions. We require all of the respondents to answer three questions related to the sensitive information. This technique recovers sensitive information at a disaggregated level while still allowing arbitrary misreporting in survey responses. An application of the MRT provides novel empirical evidence on sexual orientation and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT)-related sentiment.