Dipartimento di Scienze Statistiche

 PhD program in Statistics DSS Statistics Seminar      Surveying sensitive topics with indirect questioning techniques: methods and real applications Pier Francesco Perri Dipartimento di Economia, Statistica e Finanza “Giovanni Anania” Università della Calabria In many fields of the applied research, mostly in sociological, economics, demographic, ecological and medical studies, the investigator very often has to gather information concerning highly personal, sensitive, stigmatizing, and perhaps incriminating issues such as drug addiction, domestic violence, racial prejudice, illegal income, noncompliance with laws and regulations. Doing research on sensitive themes by traditional direct questioning survey modes is not an easy matter since it is likely to meet with two sources of errors: nonresponse and untruthful answers. These errors can seriously flaw the quality of the data and, thus, jeopardize the usefulness of the collected information for subsequent analyses including inference on unknown characteristics of the population under study. Although the errors cannot be totally avoided, they may be mitigated by increasing respondent cooperation through a nonstandard data-collection approach based on indirect questioning techniques (IQTs). The talk aims to introduce some issues related to privacy protection when sensitive topics are surveyed, give a general idea of the approach, and illustrate how some IQTs have been used to collect data and obtain prevalence estimates in a number of real studies about illegal immigrants, abortion, drug use, cannabis legalization, sexual behaviours and Covid-19 health behaviours.      In allegato la locandina del seminario.