Liebe Kolleginnen und Kollegen, anbei ein weiterer Call for Papers für eine Session bei der ESRA im kommenden Juli (17.-21.7.) in Lissabon. Wir freuen uns auf Ihre Einreichungen. Mit freundlichen Grüßen Ivar Krumpal, Ben Jann, Mark Trappmann,

Researching Sensitive Topics: Improving Theory and Survey Design

Convenor Dr Ivar Krumpal (University of Leipzig) Coordinator 1 Professor Ben Jann (University of Bern) Coordinator 2 Professor Mark Trappmann (IAB Nürnberg)

Social desirability bias is a problem in surveys collecting data on private issues, deviant behavior or unsocial opinions (e.g. sex, health, income, illicit drug use, tax evasion or xenophobia) as soon as the respondents' true scores differ from social norms. Asking sensitive questions poses a dilemma to survey participants. On the one hand, politeness norms may oblige the respondent to be helpful and cooperative and self-report the sensitive personal information truthfully. On the other hand, the respondent may not trust in his or her data protection and may fear negative consequences from self-reporting norm-violating behavior or opinions. Cumulative empirical evidence shows that in the context of surveying sensitive issues respondents often engage in self-protective behavior, i.e. they either give socially desirable answers or they refuse to answer at all. Such systematic misreporting or nonresponse leads to biased estimates and poor data quality of the entire survey study. Specific data collection approaches were proposed to increase respondents' cooperation and improve validity of self-reports in sensitive surveys.

This session is about deepening our knowledge of the data generation process and advancing the theoretical basis of the ongoing debate about establishing best practices and designs for surveying sensitive topics. We invite submissions that deal with these problems and/or present potential solutions. In particular, we are interested in studies that (1) reason about the psychological processes and social interactions between the actors that are involved in the collection of the sensitive data; (2) present current empirical research focusing on 'question-and-answer' based (e.g. randomized response techniques, factorial surveys), non-reactive (e.g. record linkage approaches, field experiments or administrative data usage) or mixed methods of data collection (e.g. big data analyses in combination with classical survey approaches) focusing on the problem of social desirability; (3) deal with statistical procedures to analyze data generated with special data collection methods; (4) explore the possibilities and limits of integrating new and innovative data collection approaches for sensitive issues in well-established, large-scale population surveys taking into account problems of research ethics and data protection.

In order to submit an abstract you need to log in to your ESRA account or create a new one at http://www.europeansurveyresearch.org/conference and then select our session which is listed in alphabetical order under "survey methodological research" -> "Researching Sensitive Topics: Improving Theory and Survey Design". The closing date for the submission of abstracts is 4th December 2016.

Prof. Dr. Mark Trappmann Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung (IAB) Forschungsbereich E3: Panel "Arbeitsmarkt und soziale Sicherung" Regensburger Str. 104 90478 Nürnberg Tel. 0911-179-3096 und Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg Fakultät für Sozial- und Wirtschaftswissenschaften Lehrstuhl für Soziologie, insbes. Survey-Methodologie 96045 Bamberg