The reduction of socially desirable responding (SDR) is a central aim of methodological research. Researchers have hence spent considerable energy trying to find techniques which reduce socially desirable responding. Advances in this field are hampered by the fact that the effectiveness of such techniques is hard to assess because measures of the true values for the variables in question are often unavailable. The present paper presents a method that helps overcome this obstacle, the Randomized Overclaiming Method (ROME). It employs a knowledge questionnaire, measures SDR as the number of non-existent items claimed as known and randomizes respondents into a control …

Survey researchers often include measures of social desirability in questionnaires. The Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding (BIDR; Paulhus, 1991) is a widely used instrument that measures two components of socially desirable responding: self-deceptive enhancement (SDE) and impression management (IM). An open question is whether these scales should be scored dichotomously (counting only extreme values) or continuously (taking the mean of the answers). This paper compares the two methods with respect to test-retest reliability (stability) and internal consistency using a short German version of the BIDR (Winkler, Kroh, & Spiess, 2006). Tests of criterion validity are also presented. Data are taken …