Family adjustment,parental attitudes,and social desirability

This study examines the role of social desirability response set on the report of marital adjustment, child adjustment, and parenting attitudes. Results from 69 married couples closely replicate previous self-report findings suggesting that the more positive the report of marital adjustment, the fewer the number of child problem behaviors endorsed by parents (r = -.19(69), p less than .05). When social desirability is controlled, however, the marital-child adjustment relationship is nonsignificant. Previous reports of a global relationship between marital and child adjustment may have been inflated by individual differences in willingness to endorse problems on self-report measures. Parenting attitudes are not associated with social desirability or marital adjustment. Warmth, but not authoritarianism, is negatively correlated with child behavior problems in the home (r = -.25(69), p less than .01). The authors propose that family interaction research use a multimethod strategy to focus on circumscribed variables that influence marital and parenting behavior.     

Religiosity and social desirability: A response to Eysenck (1999)

Recent studies have shown that delusion-like experiences (DLEs) are common among general populations. This study investigates whether the prevalence of these experiences are linked to the embracing of New Age thought. Logistic regression analyses were performed using data derived from a large community sample of young adults (N = 3777). Belief in a spiritual or higher power other than God was found to be significantly associated with endorsement of 16 of 19 items from Peters et al. (1999b Peters, ER, Joseph, SA and Garety, PA. 1999b. Measurement of delusional ideation in the normal population: Introducing the PDI (Peters et al. Delusions Inventory). Schizophrenia Bulletin, 25(3): 553–576. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) Delusional Inventory following adjustment for a range of potential confounders, while belief in God was associated with endorsement of four items. A New Age conception of the divine appears to be strongly associated with a wide range of DLEs. Further research is needed to determine a causal link between New Age philosophy and DLEs (e.g. thought disturbance, suspiciousness, and delusions of grandeur).     

Response bias,social desirability and dissimulation

This review set out to review the extensive literature on response bias, and particularly dissimulating a socially desirable response to self-report data. Various terminological differences are discussed as well as the way test constructors attempt to measure or overcome social desirability response sets. As an example of the research in this field, four types of studies measuring social desirability in the Eysenckian personality measures (MPI, EPI, EPQ) are reviewed. Also studies of faking in psychiatric symptom inventories, and a wide range of other tests are briefly reviewed. Various equivocal results from attempts to determine what makes some measures more prone to social desirability than others. However there appears to be growing evidence that social desirability is a relatively stable, multidimensional trait, rather than a situationally-specific response set. Faking studies may also be used to examine people's stereotypes and images of normality and abnormality, and various studies of‘abnormal groups’ perception of normality are examined. Recommendations for further work in this area are proposed.     

Psychoticism,social desirability and situation selection

Previous research on personality and activity preference has shown that extraverts have a significantly and meaningfully different pattern of activity preference from introverts. This finding was also true of high and low neurotics but not to the same extent. This study was designed to see whether the traits of psychoticism and social desirability are also related to situational selection. Subjects from a large group were divided first into high P and low P scorers, and then high L and low L scorers. They indicated how much time they had spent in leisure situations over the past week; rank ordered their preferences for activities related to some of Murray's major needs and presses; rated their choice or avoidance of other abstractly described situations; and then stressful, anxiety-provoking, social situations. It was shown that both psychoticism and social desirability are related to situation selection in meaningful and predictable ways. The implications for personality assessment are considered.     

Social goals: Relationship to adolescent adjustment and to social problem solving

Examined the relations between adolescent boys' social goals of dominance, revenge, avoidance, and affiliation and (1) self-reported negative adolescent outcomes; (2) subjective sense of self-esteem; and (3) externalizing, internalizing, and prosocial behaviors, as rated by peers and teachers. Results indicated that social goal values were related to diverse aspects of self-, teacher-, and peer-reported social and behavioral functioning, with a consistent association found between a range of delinquent, substance-using, and behavioral difficulties, and endorsement of high goal values for dominance and revenge and low goal values for affiliation. Results also indicated that teacher-identified aggressive boys differed from nonaggressive boys in the value they placed on social goals, with aggressive boys placing a higher value on goals of dominance and revenge, and lower value on goals for affiliation. Finally social goal choice had a clear relation to the social problem-solving differences of aggressive and nonaggressive boys.This study was funded by a research grant for the National Institute of Mental Health (MH 39989). Acknowledgment is made for the administrative support provided by the Durham County Schools and The Durham Community Guidance Clinic of the Duke University Medical Center.