ESRA 2027 sessions by theme
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InIndirect Questioning Techniques for Sensitive Surveys: Advances, Applications, and Challenges |
| Coordinator 1 | Professor Pier Francesco Perri (University of Calabria, Department of Economics, Statistics and Finance "Giovanni Anania") |
Session Details
Surveys addressing personal, sensitive, socially undesirable topics or potentially incriminating behaviors face considerable challenges when relying on traditional direct questioning formats. Indirect Questioning Techniques (IQTs) provide a valuable methodological alternative by protecting respondent privacy and reducing social desirability, nonresponse, and response biases, thereby making estimates of sensitive population characteristics more reliable.
Despite their potential, IQTs present important methodological challenges. The privacy protection they offer may come at the cost of statistical efficiency compared to direct questioning, and their effectiveness relies on respondents’ understanding and compliance. However, non-compliance and self-protective responses may occur, affecting the validity of IQT-based analyses.
Contributions using survey experiments to compare direct and indirect questioning or alternative IQT designs are particularly welcome. We also invite studies on improving the statistical efficiency of IQT estimators, developing models and estimators that account for cheating and non-compliance, and methods for detecting and correcting their effects on IQT estimates.
A further challenge concerns inference from IQT surveys based on non-probability samples, often used in empirical studies despite the selection bias that may compromise valid inference for the target population. While IQTs can mitigate measurement and response biases, they do not address selection bias arising from the sampling mechanism. Contributions addressing this issue through weighting, calibration, propensity-score adjustment, machine learning, auxiliary information, or doubly robust methods are particularly encouraged.
Finally, the session also welcomes contributions assessing the formal level of privacy protection provided by IQTs and the level perceived by respondents. Applications to contemporary sensitive topics and the use of scrambled response models for investigating quantitative sensitive variables are also encouraged, as are contributions addressing the implementation of IQTs through statistical software, web-based tools, and mobile or app-based platforms.
