Abstract
The main motivation behind indirect questioning is to increase participation, reduce nonresponse and reduce untruthful responses in surveys dealing with stigmatizing characteristics. Indirect questioning techniques are often advertised as methods protecting the privacy of the participants in surveys dealing with stigmatizing or sensitive issues. This is easy for anyone to see. However, different techniques do not necessarily offer the same level of protection. Quantitative measures of the protection of privacy and measures of jeopardy have been devised, which can be used, among other things, to compare one indirect questioning technique to another. Those measures are discussed and special emphasis is put on their limitations. In this chapter a case is made for the need to develop quantitative measures of the protection of privacy as perceived by the participants. A person is willing to participate in indirect questioning sample surveys if he/she feels that his/her privacy is protected and that the answer provided is not sufficient for someone to determine whether he/she bears the stigmatizing characteristic. Real life examples are cited which prove that the issue of privacy protection from the participant’s point of view is indeed very important.
Keywords
- Indirect Questioning Techniques
- Stigmatizing Characteristic
- Privacy Protection
- Randomized Response Technique
- Randomization Device
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Chaudhuri, A., Christofides, T.C. (2013). Protection of Privacy. In: Indirect Questioning in Sample Surveys. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-36276-7_7
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