Title: Determinants and Consequences of Survey Respondents' Social Desirability Beliefs about Racial Attitudes
Abstract: Abstract. In this article, we first analyze the respondents' beliefs about the social desirability of ten racial attitude items from the German General Social Survey (ALLBUS). We found these beliefs, which serve as the basis for the incentives for social desirability (SD) bias, to differ according to the respondents' sex, age, and education, as well as for the analyzed attitude items. Second, we found that these incentive differences, observed in our urban West-German sample, predicted the attitude answers of respondents from the nationwide ALLBUS survey in 1996. This effect was, furthermore, stronger for respondents with congruent characteristics. Our results suggest (1) that the ALLBUS data about the analyzed topic are susceptible to SD bias, (2) that particular items are more strongly affected in this respect, and (3) that differences in the racial attitude reports between certain groups of respondents may only be the result of differently strong SD bias.