Black Magic Using Randomized Response Techniques

• Activity Number: 345
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Tuesday, August 5, 2014 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Social Statistics Section
• Author(s): Cheon Sig Lee*+ and Stephen Andrew Sedory and Sarjinder Singh
• Companies: Coastal Bend College and Texas A&M and Texas A&M
• Keywords: Estimation of proportions ; Sensitive characteristics ; Randomized response sampling

Abstract

In this paper, we revisit the problem of estimating the proportion of people in a population who possess one or both of a pair of sensitive characteristics as considered by Lee, Sedory and Singh (2013: Statistics and Probability Letters). The method in that paper allowed the seeming magic of obtaining estimates of three parameters while taking a pair of responses per respondent. The method proposed here results in the seemingly black magic of allowing the estimation of the same parameters from a single response per respondent of the sample. Bias and variance expressions of the proposed estimator are derived and compared to the Lee, Sedory and Singh (2013) estimators using simulation studies.