Randomized Response Technique
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.
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Sources
- Warner, S. L. (1965). Randomized Response: A Survey Technique for Eliminating Evasive Answer Bias. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 60(309), 63–69. DOI: 10.1080/01621459.1965.10480775 ↗
- Greenberg, B. G., Abul-Ela, A. A., Simmons, W. R., & Horvitz, D. G. (1969). The Unrelated Question Randomized Response Model: Theoretical Framework. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 64(326), 520–539. DOI: 10.1080/01621459.1969.10500991 ↗
- Blair, G., Imai, K., & Zhou, Y.-Y. (2015). Design and Analysis of the Randomized Response Technique. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 110(511), 1304–1319. DOI: 10.1080/01621459.2015.1050028 ↗
How to cite this page
ScholarGate. (2026, June 22). Randomized Response Technique for Sensitive Questions. ScholarGate. https://scholargate.app/en/political-science/randomized-response-technique
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