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A Social Desirability Item Response Theory Model: Retrieve–Deceive–Transfer

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2025

Cheng-Han Leng Open the ORCID record for Cheng-Han Leng [Opens in a new window] ,
Hung-Yu Huang  and
Grace Yao
Cheng-Han Leng
Affiliation:
National Taiwan University
Hung-Yu Huang
Affiliation:
University of Taipei
Grace Yao*
Affiliation:
National Taiwan University
*
Correspondence should be made to Grace Yao, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan. Email: kaiping@ntu.edu.tw
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Abstract

In this study, a new item response theory model is developed to account for situations in which respondents overreport or underreport their actual opinions on a positive or negativeissue. Such behavior is supposed to be a result of deception and transfer mechanisms. In the proposed model, this behavior is simulated by incorporating a deception term into a multidimensional rating scale model, followed by multiplication by a transfer term, with the two operations performed by an indicator function and a transition matrix separately. The proposed model is presented in a Bayesian framework approximated by Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms. Through a series of simulations, the parameters of the proposed model are recovered accurately. The methodology is also implemented within an online experimental study to demonstrate the methodology’s application.

Keywords

socially desirable behavior (SDB)item response theory (IRT) modelmultidimensional rating scale (MRS) model
Type
Original Paper
Information
Psychometrika , Volume 85 , Issue 1 , March 2020 , pp. 56 - 74
Copyright
Copyright © 2019 The Psychometric Society

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Footnotes

Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11336-019-09689-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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