In our fields this refers to a bias that can affect self-report particularly on questionnaires (and interviews) exploring socially marginalised thoughts, feelings and behaviours and hence a bias that can affect typical measures of distress and dysfunction. The idea is that we differ in how much we try to present ourselves, or simply do see ourselves, as more socially conforming, more exhibiting only socially “desired” states so the higher we are on “social desirability” the more likely it is that our self-report might score lower on problems than someone who knows us well might expect.
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This tendency does almost certainly impact on our self-perception and self-presentation. There are a number of ways to detect its effect and, in principle, to minimise the effect, perhaps the simplest and most important for everyday use of measures is for the person presenting questionnaires to clients to convey a non-judgemental interest in the clients’ answers. When designing new measures some researchers give the new measure with a separate questionnaire such as the Crowne-Marlowe (or Marlowe-Crowne), Social Desirability Scale, Self-Deception Questionnaire or Brief Social Desirability Scale to explore how strongly responses to the entire new questionnaire, and to individual items on it, correlated with those measures of social desirability. If still developing a new questionnaire it may be wise to remove items that showed a strong correlation with the measure of social desirability.
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Not covered in the OMbook.
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I can’t see me creating any.
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First created 1`5.ii.25.
