Advances in Estimation of Sensitive Issues on Successive Occasions

Abstract

Surveys related to sensitive issues are accompanied with social desirability response bias which flaw the validity of analysis. This problem became serious when sensitive issues are estimated on successive occasions. The scrambled response technique is an alternative solution as it preserve respondents anonymity. Therefore, the present article endeavours to propose an improved class of estimators for estimating sensitive population mean at current occasion using an innocuous variable in two occasion successive sampling. Detailed properties of the estimators are analysed. Optimum allocation to fresh and matched samples are obtained. Many existing estimators in successive sampling have been modified to work for sensitive population mean estimation under scrambled response technique. The proposed estimators has been compared with recent modified estimators. Theoretical considerations are integrated with empirical and simulation studies to ascertain the efficiency gain derived from the proposed improved class of estimators.

Keywords

• sensitive variable
• successive occasions
• scrambled response model
• population mean
• optimum matching fraction