A discussion of the two different aspects of privacy protection in indirect questioning designs

Abstract

The motivation behind considering the use of indirect questioning designs is their possible positive effect on the respondents’ willingness to cooperate. Whereas the privacy protection objectively offered by these methods has a direct effect on the estimator’s efficiency, it is the subjectively perceived protection which affects the respondents’ willingness to cooperate. For the discussion of these different aspects of privacy protection, a family of randomized response techniques enabling the tailoring of the design’s privacy protection to the respondents is presented as representative of indirect questioning designs. Measures are suggested that formalize how the objectively offered and subjectively perceived privacy protection may differ. Different features of randomized response questioning designs, influencing the perceived privacy protection, are discussed particularly for the “crosswise model” in order to avoid underestimations of the true levels of privacy protection, which would be counter-productive with regard to the respondents’ cooperation propensity.