Acquiescence in personality questionnaires: Relevance, domain specificity, and stability☆

Acquiescence, which is defined as agreeing to items regardless of content, is a well-known bias in self-report instruments. This paper investigates the relevance, domain specificity, and the stability of acquiescence in personality questionnaires. Data from two large samples representative for the German (N = 1999) and for the Austrian adult population (N = 3266) were investigated with structural equation models. In both studies respondents answered, besides others, a short Big Five inventory. The three core findings are: (1) acquiescence systematically affects the variance of personality items and biases the association with other variables, (2) acquiescence is consistent across different question types, and (3) acquiescence in personality items is moderately stable over time. Implications for research and the application of personality questionnaires are discussed.

[1]  M. Geuens,et al.  The Individual Consistency of Acquiescence and Extreme Response Style in Self-Report Questionnaires , 2010 .

[2]  Alberto Maydeu-Olivares,et al.  Item Response Modeling of Forced-Choice Questionnaires , 2011 .

[3]  S. Gosling,et al.  The developmental psychometrics of big five self-reports: acquiescence, factor structure, coherence, and differentiation from ages 10 to 20. , 2008, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[4]  G. Moran,et al.  Double agreement as a function of item ambiguity and susceptibility to demand implications of the psychological situation. , 1967, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[5]  H. Marsh,et al.  Longitudinal tests of competing factor structures for the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale: traits, ephemeral artifacts, and stable response styles. , 2010, Psychological assessment.

[6]  R. Hoyle.  Structural equation modeling: concepts, issues, and applications , 1997 .

[7]  J. Ray.  Reviving the problem of acquiescent response bias. , 1983 .

[8]  M. Geuens,et al.  The stability of individual response styles. , 2008, Psychological methods.

[9]  Ingwer Borg,et al.  The measurement equivalence of Big Five factor markers for persons with different levels of education. , 2010, Journal of research in personality.

[10]  G. Gudjonsson,et al.  The relationship between confabulation and intellectual ability, memory, interrogative suggestibility and acquiescence , 1995 .

[11]  Michael Eid,et al.  Latent state–trait theory and research in personality and individual differences , 1999 .

[12]  Julian Aichholzer.  Intra-individual variation of extreme response style in mixed-mode panel studies , 2013, Social science research.

[13]  G. Stone,et al.  The intermediary key in the analysis of interpersonal perception. , 1956, Psychological bulletin.

[14]  L. G. Rorer,et al.  Acquiescence in the MMPI? , 1965 .

[15]  K. Bollen.  A New Incremental Fit Index for General Structural Equation Models , 1989 .

[16]  M. Eid,et al.  Separating trait effects from trait-specific method effects in multitrait-multimethod models: a multiple-indicator CT-C(M-1) model. , 2003, Psychological methods.

[17]  O. John,et al.  Measuring personality in one minute or less: A 10-item short version of the Big Five Inventory in English and German , 2007 .

[18]  Jaak Billiet,et al.  Modeling Acquiescence in Measurement Models for Two Balanced Sets of Items , 2000 .

[19]  Andreas Hinz,et al.  The acquiescence effect in responding to a questionnaire , 2007, Psycho-social medicine.

[20]  L. L. Elliott.  Effects of Item Construction and Respondent Aptitude on Response Acquiescence1 , 1961 .

[21]  E. Chico,et al.  The convergent validity of acquiescence: an empirical study relating balanced scales and separate acquiescence scales , 2004 .

[22]  G. Gudjonsson,et al.  Personality and deception. Are suggestibility, compliance and acquiescence related to socially desirable responding? , 2011 .

[23]  R. Groves,et al.  Survey Errors and Survey Costs. , 1991 .

[24]  Beatrice Rammstedt,et al.  The impact of acquiescence on the evaluation of personality structure. , 2013, Psychological assessment.

[25]  Patrick E. Shrout,et al.  Reliability of Scales With General Structure: Point and Interval Estimation Using a Structural Equation Modeling Approach , 2002 .

[26]  R. Motl,et al.  Longitudinal Invariance of Self-Esteem and Method Effects Associated With Negatively Worded Items , 2002 .

[27]  Jack Block,et al.  The challenge of response sets: Unconfounding meaning, acquiescence, and social desirability in the MMPI. , 1965 .

[28]  Auke Tellegen,et al.  The Analysis of Consistency in Personality Assessment , 1988 .

[29]  E. S. Knowles,et al.  Acquiescent Responding in Self-Reports: Cognitive Style or Social Concern? ☆ ☆☆ ★ , 1997 .

[30]  Beatrice Rammstedt,et al.  Does Response Scale Format Affect the Answering of Personality Scales , 2007 .

[31]  Beatrice Rammstedt,et al.  Measurement equivalence of the Big Five: Shedding further light on potential causes of the educational bias , 2011 .

[32]  K. Gana,et al.  Longitudinal factorial invariance of the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale: Determining the nature of method effects due to item wording , 2013 .

[33]  Catherine E. Ross,et al.  Eliminating defense and agreement bias from measures of the sense of control : A 2×2 index , 1991 .

[34]  S. Srivastava,et al.  The Big Five Trait taxonomy: History, measurement, and theoretical perspectives. , 1999 .

[35]  J. Krosnick.  Response strategies for coping with the cognitive demands of attitude measures in surveys , 1991 .

[36]  Urbano Lorenzo-Seva,et al.  Acquiescence as a source of bias and model and person misfit: a theoretical and empirical analysis. , 2010, The British journal of mathematical and statistical psychology.

[37]  C. Wolf,et al.  Repeatedly questioned respondents of the Short-term Campaign Panel 2009 and 2013 (GLES) , 2016 .

[38]  P M Bentler,et al.  Identification of content and style: a two-dimensional interpretation of acquiescence. , 1971, Psychological bulletin.

[39]  B. Muthén,et al.  Exploratory Structural Equation Modeling , 2009 .

[40]  Lee J. Cronbach,et al.  Studies of acquiescence as a factor in the true-false test. , 1942 .

[41]  F. Lang,et al.  Testgüte und psychometrische Äquivalenz der deutschen Version des Big Five Inventory (BFI) bei jungen, mittelalten und alten Erwachsenen , 2001 .

[42]  A. Tellegen,et al.  Psychometric functioning of the MMPI-2-RF VRIN-r and TRIN-r scales with varying degrees of randomness, acquiescence, and counter-acquiescence. , 2010, Psychological assessment.

[43]  Gordon W. Cheung,et al.  Evaluating Goodness-of-Fit Indexes for Testing Measurement Invariance , 2002 .

[44]  D. Paulhus.  Measurement and control of response bias. , 1991 .

[45]  Julian Aichholzer.  Random intercept EFA of personality scales , 2014, Journal of research in personality.

[46]  E. Davidov,et al.  Testing the Stability of an Acquiescence Style Factor Behind Two Interrelated Substantive Variables in a Panel Design , 2008 .

[47]  I. Borg,et al.  Correcting Big Five Personality Measurements for Acquiescence: An 18–Country Cross–Cultural Study , 2013 .

[48]  Anthony J. Onwuegbuzie,et al.  Characteristics of respondents who respond differently to positively and negatively worded items on rating scales , 2003 .

[49]  Carl F. Falk,et al.  Recovering Substantive Factor Loadings in the Presence of Acquiescence Bias: A Comparison of Three Approaches , 2014, Multivariate behavioral research.

[50]  David E. Kanouse,et al.  Controlling for Acquiescence Response Set in Scale Development , 1982 .

[51]  G. Gudjonsson.  The relationship between interrogative suggestibility and acquiescence: Empirical findings and theoretical implications , 1986 .

[52]  Seymour Epstein,et al.  Aggregation and beyond: Some basic issues on the prediction of behavior. , 1983, Journal of personality.

[53]  H. Blumberg.  The specificity of acquiescence. , 1973, Journal of personality assessment.