A Standardization of Randomized Response Strategies

Randomized response strategies, which have originally been developed as statistical methods to reduce nonresponse as well as untruthful answering, can also be applied in the field of statistical disclosure control for public use microdata files. In this paper a standardization of randomized response techniques for the estimation of proportions of identifying or sensitive attributes is presented. The statistical properties of the standardized estimator are derived for general probability sampling. In order to analyse the effect of different choices of the method's implicit ``design parameters'' on the performance of the estimator we have to include measures of privacy protection in our considerations. These yield variance-optimum design parameters given a certain level of privacy protection. To this end the variables have to be classified into different categories of sensitivity. A real-data example applies the technique in a survey on academic cheating behaviour.