The impact of anonymity on responses to sensitive questions

To estimate frequencies of behaviors not carried out in public view researc hers generally must rely on self-report data. We explored 2 factors expecte d to influence the decision to reveal: (a) privacy (anonymity vs. confident iality) and (b) normalization (providing information so that a behavior is reputedly commonplace or rare). We administered a questionnaire to 155 unde rgraduates. For 79 respondents, we had corroborative information regarding a negative behavior: cheating. The privacy variable had an enormous impact; of those who had cheated, 25% acknowledged having done so under confidenti ality. but 74% admitted the behavior under anonymity. Normalization had no effect. There were also dramatic differences between anonymity and confiden tiality on some of our other questions, for which we did not have validatio n.