The Identification And Estimation Of Social Desirability Bias In Moral Evaluation

Response Bias is an important factor affecting the reliability and validity of questionnaires and scales,and Social Desirability Bias is one of the main Response biases.The evaluation of moral character contains a wide range of social desirability effects,which affects the accuracy of the test.In this study,the RDT model developed by Cheng-han Leng et al was applied to the assessment of morality,which verified the feasibility of the RDT model in the assessment of morality and provide a new method for more accurate assessment of the moral character of the subjects.In order to verify the effectiveness of the RDT model in accurately estimating the parameters of the subjects when analyzing the data with social desirability bias,this study conducted a simulation study and an empirical study to demonstrate the RDT model.Compared with the traditional Item Response Theory(IRT)Model,Graded Response Model,the simulation study demonstrates the superiority of RDT Model in accurately estimating the subjects’ parameters when analyzing the data with social desirability bias.At the same time,the influence of test length and sample size on the estimation accuracy of RDT model is considered.The results show that the estimation accuracy of the RDT model is affected by the number of questions(i.e.,the length of the test).The more questions there are,the higher the estimation accuracy is,but the estimation accuracy is not significantly affected by the change of sample size.In the empirical study,the RDT model is applied to the measured data to demonstrate the suitability of the model in practical application.The data of this study was a character assessment questionnaire in Beibei Primary School in Chongqing,which consisted of38 questions in 4 dimensions and 826 subjects.The results show that the RDT model can fit the measured data well,and estimate the ability values of the participants in each dimension of the questionnaire,as well as the ability values of the deceptive tendency and the transfer tendency.