IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/xrs/sfbmaa/01-22.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Socially Desirable Response Behavior as Rational Choice: The Case of Attitudes Towards Foreigners

Author

Listed:
  • Stocké, Volker

    (Sonderforschungsbereich 504)

Abstract

The respondents in social surveys often answer in a socially desirable, rather than in a truthful manner. Although several factors are found to influence the strength of this social desirability response bias, their interplay with each other is widely neglected because of the insufficient theoretical foundation in this field of research. A rational-choice model is therefore proposed as the theoretical basis for explaining socially desirable response behavior. This model is applied in order to explain the respondents' answers concerning their attitudes towards foreigners. The predicted three-way interaction effect between the response privacy, the differences in the options' social desirability and the respondents' need for social approval proves to be a relevant predictor for the responses. Accordingly, the subjects answers become more conform with the perceived evaluation standards of the society as their need for social approval increases and simultaneously an 'audience' is present to provide positive or negative feedback.

Suggested Citation

  • Stocké, Volker, 2001. "Socially Desirable Response Behavior as Rational Choice: The Case of Attitudes Towards Foreigners," Sonderforschungsbereich 504 Publications 01-22, Sonderforschungsbereich 504, Universität Mannheim;Sonderforschungsbereich 504, University of Mannheim.
    • Handle: RePEc:xrs:sfbmaa:01-22
    Note: Stimulating comments of and discussions with Hartmut Esser, Nikolaus Beck, Till Deibele and Stephan Ganter are gratefully acknowledged. Furthermore, I thank several participants of the 'Fifth International Conference on Social Science Methodology of the International Sociological Association' in Cologne, October 3-6, 2000 for helpful discussions about an earlier version of this paper. Financial support from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, SFB 504, at the University of Mannheim, is gratefully acknowledged.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Essig, Lothar, 2004. "Precautionary saving and old-age provisions: Do subjective saving motives measures work?," Sonderforschungsbereich 504 Publications 05-22, Sonderforschungsbereich 504, Universität Mannheim;Sonderforschungsbereich 504, University of Mannheim.
    2. Lothar Essig, 2005. "Precautionary saving and old-age provisions: Do subjective saving motive measures work?," MEA discussion paper series 05084, Munich Center for the Economics of Aging (MEA) at the Max Planck Institute for Social Law and Social Policy.
    3. Essig, Lothar, 2005. "Precautionary saving and old-age provisions : do subjective saving motives measures work?," Papers 05-22, Sonderforschungsbreich 504.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:xrs:sfbmaa:01-22. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Carsten Schmidt (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/sfmande.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.