Citation
Blair, Graeme, Kosuke Imai, and Jason Lyall. (2014). “Comparing and Combining List and Endorsement Experiments.” American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 58, No. 4 (October), pp. 1043-1063.
Abstract
List and endorsement experiments are becoming increasingly popular among social scientists as indirect survey techniques for sensitive questions. When studying issues such as racial prejudice and support for militant groups, these survey methodologies may improve the validity of measurements by reducing non-response and social desirability biases. We develop a statistical test and multivariate regression models for comparing and combining the results from list and endorsement experiments. We demonstrate that when carefully designed and analyzed, the two survey experiments can produce substantively similar empirical findings. Such agreement is shown to be possible even when these experiments are applied to one of the most challenging research environments: contemporary Afghanistan. We find that both experiments uncover similar patterns of support for the International Security Assistance Force among Pashtun respondents. Our findings suggest that multiple measurement strategies can enhance the credibility of empirical conclusions. Open-source software is available for implementing the proposed methods.
Other Information
- See this World Bank blog post that discusses this paper.
- See this page for the information about the project on the elicitation of truthful answers to sensitive survey questions.
- The software package that implements the proposed method is available here for download.