Methodological Issues in the Design of Online Surveys for Measuring Unethical Work Behavior: Recommendations on the Basis of a Split-Ballot Experiment

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in unethical work behavior. Several types of survey instruments to collect information about unethical work behavior are available. Nevertheless, to date little attention has been paid to design issues of those surveys. There are, however, sever...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of business ethics Vol. 120; no. 2; pp. 275 - 289
Main Authors Wouters, Kristel, Maesschalck, Jeroen, Peeters, Carel F. W., Roosen, Marijke
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Dordrecht Springer 01.03.2014
Springer Netherlands
Springer Nature B.V
Subjects
Bias
Business and Management
Business Ethics
Corruption
Criminology
Education
Ethical behavior
Ethics
Experiments
Fraud
Hypotheses
Management
Moral judgment
Organizational behavior
Personnel selection
Philosophy
Polls & surveys
Qualitative research
Quality of Life Research
Questionnaires
Research ethics
Research methodology
Research methods
Self reports
Social desirability bias
Social ethics
Studies
Survey design
Validity
Violations
Social desirability bias
Participation bias
Anchors/labels
Response scales
Unethical work behavior
Background questions
Measurement error
Online AccessGet full text

Cover

More Information
Summary:In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in unethical work behavior. Several types of survey instruments to collect information about unethical work behavior are available. Nevertheless, to date little attention has been paid to design issues of those surveys. There are, however, several important problems that may influence reliability and validity of questionnaire data on the topic, such as social desirability bias. This paper addresses two important issues in the design of online surveys on unethical work behavior: the response scale for questions regarding the frequency of certain types of unethical work behavior and the location of the background questions in an online survey. We present the results of an analysis of a double split-ballot experiment in a large sample (n = 3,386) on governmental integrity. We found that, when comparing response scales that have labels for all categories with response scales that only have anchors at the end, the latter provided answers with higher validity. The study did not provide support for the conventional practice of asking background questions at the end.
ISSN:0167-4544
1573-0697
DOI:10.1007/s10551-013-1659-5