Fox, Jessica K.

Oral, Evrim

English

ISU ReD: Research and eData

Presentation for the Symposium on BEER November 2020Direct Questioning of Sensitive Topics in PublicHealth Studies: A Simulation StudyJessica K. Fox1, Evrim Oral1,*1LSU Health Sciences Center, School of Public Health, Biostatistics Program, New Orleans, LA 70112eoral@lsuhsc.eduIn health related research, researchers often study sensitive topics such as sexually transmitted diseases,medical compliance, mental health, or drug and alcohol abuse. When such questions are asked directly,respondents show a tendency of answering questions in a socially acceptable fashion rather than answeringthem truthfully, causing bias in estimates. Several indirect surveying methodologies have been developed toincrease the respondents’ confidentiality and obtain honest responses. The most commonly used one is theWarner’s randomized response technique (RRT), which asks the sensitive question by providing respondentsa randomization device with two statements that appear on it with known probabilities θ and 1−θ. AlthoughWarner’s RRT leads to unbiased estimates of the sensitive characteristic of interest, its theoretical variance islarger than the one from the direct questioning technique (DQT). However, to our knowledge, the empiricalmean square error (MSE) from DQT has not been studied under different scenarios where cheating proportionin the population varies. We show that under some situations the empirical MSE from Warner’s RRT becomessmaller than the MSE from DQT using an extensive Monte Carlo simulation study. We also provide somereal life applications of RRTs where the estimates are compared to the ones from DQT, including a studyon injection drug users.

Direct Questioning of Sensitive Topics in Public Health Studies: A Simulation Study

https://ir.library.illinoisstate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?filename=0&article=1473&context=beer&type=additional

Direct Questioning of Sensitive Topics in Public Health Studies: A Simulation Study

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ISU ReD: Research and eData