Self-report measure

Social Desirability

A 30-item public-domain IPIP scale of socially desirable responding, with two facets: Impression-Management (deliberately favorable self-presentation) and Self-Deceptive Enhancement (an honestly held but overly positive self-view). It is a response-style measure, not a clinical or diagnostic instrument.

At a glance

Items
30
Response scale
5-point (Very Inaccurate … Very Accurate)
Est. time
~10 min
Subscales
2
Norms
Referenced (N = 531)
Access
Free, self-serve

Detailed write-up pending

A full, citation-backed scientific write-up for this scale — overview, clinical use, and psychometrics in the voice of a dissertation "Measures" section — has not yet been authored. To honor the platform's no-fabricated-sources rule, this page currently shows only the verified registry facts above (item count, structure, scoring, and any published norms). No validity coefficients, reliability figures, or citations are shown here that cannot be traced to a named source; the authored write-up will be added once its sources have been read and recorded in the plan-integrity file.

Subscales

Impression-Management 20 items

how much you present yourself in a favorable, socially approved way

Self-Deceptive Enhancement 10 items

how much you hold an honestly positive but inflated self-view

Example item

“Would never take things that aren't mine.”

Very InaccurateModerately InaccurateNeither Accurate nor InaccurateModerately AccurateVery Accurate

Illustrative only. During administration items are presented one screen-set at a time; response-key direction is never shown to respondents.

Scoring & interpretation

Item responses are summed within each scale (reverse-keyed items recoded first) and expressed as a population percentile against the cited reference sample, with a reliability-based confidence range where α is published.

Psychometrics & norms

ScaleMSDNαMetric
Self-Deceptive Enhancement35.376.445310.80summed raw

Norms computed from the Eugene-Springfield Community Sample (ESCS) — Lewis R. Goldberg’s adult community panel from Eugene and Springfield, Oregon (Harvard Dataverse, doi:10.7910/DVN/UF52WY). This is a community sample and is NOT nationally representative. The mean, standard deviation, reference N and Cronbach’s α were computed directly from the raw IPIP item-level responses on THIS scale’s exact item set and reverse-keying (complete cases); reference N varies by scale and is shown with each scale below. The confidence range uses the standard error of measurement (SEM = SD·√(1−α)) from that computed α.

Source & citation

International Personality Item Pool (ipip.ori.org); facet structure after Paulhus (1984) Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding.