On the Two-Dimensional Nature of the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale

The relationship between response style and symptom reporting in cancer patients

PURPOSE

Patient-reported outcomes are considered the gold standard for documenting treatment-related toxicities and cancer-related symptoms in the management of oncology patients. Poor concordance between patients and health care professionals (HCPs) on patients' symptoms has been documented. The purpose of this study is to examine the association between social desirability, a response style, and symptom reporting in a colorectal cancer clinic.

METHODS

Patients being treated for colorectal cancer completed a social desirability measure and a symptom measure before their appointment in the oncology clinic. The HCP who saw the patient completed a symptom measure for the patient after the clinic visit.

RESULTS

One hundred sixty-nine patients consented to participate in the study. The majority of the patients had stage 4 disease. There was a statistically significant positive correlation between social desirability and overall reported symptom burden. There was a statistically significant negative correlation between social desirability and concordance between the patient and the HCP on the patient's symptoms. Social desirability scores were stable over the course of 1 year.

CONCLUSION

Sensitivity to social desirability effects seems to play an important role in patient self-report of symptoms. As social desirability is a stable quality, patients sensitive to it may be persistently at risk for undertreatment of symptoms due to limited symptom reporting.

Measuring social desirability bias in a multi-ethnic cohort sample: its relationship with self-reported physical activity, dietary habits, and factor structure

BACKGROUND

Social desirability bias is one of the oldest forms of response bias studied in social sciences. While individuals may feel the need to fake good or bad answers in response to sensitive or intrusive questions, it remains unclear how rampant such a bias is in epidemiological research pertaining to self-reported lifestyle indicators in a multicultural Asian context. The main purpose of the current study is, therefore, to examine the sociodemographic correlates and impact of social desirability responding on self-reported physical activity and dietary habits at an epidemiological scale in a non-western multi-cultural Asian setting.

METHODS

Prior to the main analyses, confirmatory and exploratory factor analyses were conducted to determine the factorial validity of a western derived concept of social desirability. Multiple regression analyses were conducted on cross-sectional data (n = 2995) extracted from a nationwide survey conducted between 2019 and 2020.

RESULTS

A unique factor structure of social desirability was found and was therefore used for subsequent analyses. Multiple regression analyses revealed older age groups, the Indian ethnic group, those with past or present marriages, and having no income, had a significantly greater tendency to act on the bias.

CONCLUSION

The construct of social desirability bias was fundamentally different in a multicultural context than previously understood. Only a small proportion of variance of self-report lifestyle scores was explained by social desirability, thus providing support for data integrity.

Social desirability dimensionality: one or two continua?

Background

The objective of this paper is to examine the structure of social desirability. This variable is important in self-report question-naires. Theoretical analyses indicate the existence of at least two dimensions of this construct, but there is no unambiguous em-pirical evidence for such a structure of social desirability. The present research aimed to determine the factor structure of the social desirability construct and the number of its dimensions.

Participants and procedure

The inductive research strategy was applied and a new pool of questionnaire items was generated. This approach allows for detachment from the existing social desirability assessment instruments. This study focuses on the concepts of social desirability that examinees have, rather than on the content of existing items measuring social desirability. The verification of the social de-sirability structure was performed in three stages. At each stage, the number of items was gradually reduced. The successive phases of the study involved three different samples, respectively, consisting of 657, 415, and 1,709 examinees.

Results

Initially, at the first stage of the study, two dimensions were detected, but in the two subsequent stages, the second dimension represented acquiescence. The procedure of partialling the mean out of the correlation matrix was applied to eliminate acquies-cence. This dimension is related, as expected, to agreeableness and conscientiousness. It also appeared that the social desirability structure can be confounded by acquiescence in longer questionnaires.

Conclusions

It is concluded that every item reflects both social desirability and acquiescence, albeit to different extents. A one-dimensional construct of social desirability was finally obtained.

Psychometric properties of the Marlowe-Crowne social desirability scale with adult male sexual offenders

This research project investigates the factor structure, reliability, and validity of the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale (MCSDS) when used with a sample of convicted, adult male sexual offenders. Results confirm the two-factor structure (Denial and Attribution) originally proposed by the authors (Study 1, n = 247). Results also reveal that the full-scale MCSDS has strong internal consistency estimates (Study 1), discriminant and convergent validity (Study 2, n = 91), and test-retest reliability over a 3-week period (Study 3, n = 74). Information is provided to aid evaluators' interpretation of MCSDS full-scale and factor scores when used with male adult sexual offenders.

Acculturation and sexuality: investigating gender differences in erotic plasticity

The contention that women are more erotically plastic than men is supported by a significant body of data, from which it has been inferred (Baumeister, 2000) that female sexuality may be more flexible and more heavily influenced by contextual factors than that of men. As a direct test of erotic plasticity, the present study investigated the extent to which acculturation was associated differentially (as would be predicted by the theory of greater female erotic plasticity) with the sexual attitudes and experiences of 111 college men and 167 college women. For sexual attitudes, main effects were found for gender, acculturation level, and ethnicity. Women endorsed more conservative attitudes than men, less acculturated individuals endorsed more conservative sexual attitudes than the more acculturated group, and Asian Americans had the most conservative sexual attitudes. For sexual experience, a main effect was found for acculturation, with the more highly acculturated group reporting a greater variety of sexual experiences than the less acculturated group. There were no gender-by-acculturation interactions. This study thus did not find support for the theory of female erotic plasticity, insofar as the impact of acculturation on a sample of ethno-culturally diverse college students.

Social desirability and sexual offenders: a review

Social desirability--the desire to make a favorable impression on others-poses a significant threat to the validity of self-reports. This review examines research on social desirability in both forensic and nonforensic populations with the goal of identifying how best to minimize threats to the validity of research with sexual offenders. Although social desirability has long been a major research topic in personality, consensus has not been reached on key questions such as its dimensional structure and whether social desirability constitutes a trait or a response bias. Research with offenders has shown that social desirability is negatively related to recidivism and that different offender subtypes vary in the degree to which social desirability appears to influence self-reports, with child molesters exhibiting the strongest tendency to "fake good." Several methods of controlling for social desirability have been proposed, but the effectiveness of these methods in increasing validity of offender self reports is questionable. Given the lack of consensus in the personality literature, a fresh start is needed in which basic questions regarding social desirability are revisited with respect to offender populations.

Regarding some short forms of the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale

A program of Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale research is described, focusing on the distinction between positively keyed and negatively keyed items. Balanced short forms exist for the measurement of an overall social desirability construct, but evidence suggests the use as well of separate subscales. These subscales are seen to correlate differentially with the substantive personality variable neuroticism, with content-free measures of semantic style, and with self-peer agreement. A simple procedure for the concomitant measurement of possible tendency to acquiesce is also described.

Confirmatory factor analyses of the full and short versions of the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale

Over the years, researchers have developed various short versions of the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale (D. P. Crowne & D. Marlowe, 1960). The authors used confirmatory factor analyses (J. L. Arbuckle, 1997) as well as item and scale analyses to evaluate the adequacy of the full version and various short versions. Overall, the results from 232 Canadian undergraduates showed (a) that all the short versions in the present study are a significant improvement in fit over the 33-item full scale and (b) that W. M. Reynolds's (1982) Forms A and B are the best fitting short versions. No gender differences were found for the full scale or any of the short versions. The results show that the full scale could be improved psychometrically and that the psychometrically sound short versions should be available because they require less administration time than the full scale.

Self-Deceptive Enhancement and Impression Management correlates of EPQ-R dimensions

The Self-Deceptive Enhancement and Impression Management scales of the Paulhus (1991) Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding were correlated with the Psychoticism, Neuroticism, Extraversion, and Lie scales of the Eysenck EPQ-R (Eysenck & Eysenck, 1991) in a student sample. Extraversion correlated positively and Neuroticism correlated negatively with Self-Deceptive Enhancement, whereas Psychoticism correlated negatively and the Lie scale correlated positively with Impression Management. These findings suggest that the EPQ-R scales are involved in different aspects of socially desirable responding. It was concluded that social desirability should not be controlled in measures of Extraversion and Neuroticism but it should be controlled in measures of Psychoticism.