The journal Survey Methods: Insights from the Field has recently published an article entitled Comparing Continuous and Dichotomous Scoring of Social Desirability Scales by the Center for Quality in Care in Berlin.

The article discusses measures of social desirability from the Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding (BIDR), a widely used instrument in the field of research. In order to verify whether the scales of two components used in this instrument should be scored dichotomously or continuously, the study used a short German version of the BIDR (Winkler, Kroh & Spiess, 2006) to compare these two methods with respect to test-retest reliability (stability) and internal consistency.

The article is available in English only.