Compare methods

	Randomized Response Technique	List Experiment
Field	Political Science	Political Science
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1965	2011
Originator	Stanley L. Warner	Survey methodology; modern estimators by Kosuke Imai, Graeme Blair, Adam Glynn
Type	Sensitive-question survey technique	Sensitive-question survey experiment
Seminal source	Warner, S. L. (1965). Randomized Response: A Survey Technique for Eliminating Evasive Answer Bias. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 60(309), 63–69.	Imai, K. (2011). Multivariate Regression Analysis for the Item Count Technique. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 106(494), 407–416.
Aliases	RRT, Randomized response, Warner's randomized response, Forced-response technique	Item count technique, Unmatched count technique, Item count method, List randomization
Related	3	3
Summary	The randomized response technique (RRT) is a survey method for asking about sensitive or stigmatized topics while guaranteeing each respondent's privacy. Introduced by Stanley Warner in 1965, it uses a randomizing device — a coin, die, or spinner — to determine, privately and unknown to the interviewer, whether the respondent answers the sensitive question or an alternative. Because the analyst knows only the probability distribution of the device and not the outcome for any individual, no answer can be traced to a particular question, yet the population prevalence of the sensitive trait can be recovered exactly by inverting the known randomization.	The list experiment, also called the item count technique, is a survey design that measures the prevalence of a sensitive attitude or behavior without ever requiring any respondent to directly disclose it. Respondents are randomly split into two groups: a control group sees a list of innocuous items and reports only how many apply to them, while a treatment group sees the same list plus one sensitive item. Because respondents report only a count, no individual answer reveals their stance on the sensitive item, and the difference in average counts between the groups estimates the proportion holding the sensitive trait.