Psychometric methods for controlling social desirability response bias in aggression questionnaires

Resumen

Faking is understood as a respondent’s active effort to distort his/her answers to create a positive image. Although the extensive existing literature, several questions are still unsolved. On one hand, virtually no attention has been paid to an issue considered by many authors as relevant, as is the impact of individual differences on faking. On the other hand, little has been done to examine the how highly undesirable personality measures, in our society, are impacted by faking. The present work aims to shed some light to these questions. On the one hand, an indirect aggression questionnaire has been adapted. New psychometric procedures to assess the moment increments due to faking at trait level, for the group and individual levels were developed. The procedure also allows assessing the impact of individual differences on those increments. Finally, the General Factor-Analytic Procedure was tested to contrast if controlling for social desirability on personality scores will efficiently control for faking. In addition, the impact of individual differences was assessed on the three main aggression traits: physical, verbal and indirect.