MEASURING SOCIAL DESIRABILITY - SHORT FORMS OF THE MARLOWE-CROWNE SOCIAL DESIRABILITY SCALE

A practical difficulty with the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Sca le (SDS) is its length. Preferring a shorter measure of social desirab ility, researchers have devised a number of short forms of the SDS. Th e present study used confirmatory factor analysis to establish the ade quacy of these subscales in measuring social desirability. Results sho wed that (a) of the six short forms of SDS considered two models (X1 a nd X2) provide the best measures of social desirability, (b) improved measures of all of the models can be constructed, and (c) improved mea sures of the dimensions, denial and attribution, thought to measure th e latent construct of social approval can also be constructed.