Within-Subject Measures for the Assessment of Individual Differences in Faking

Abstract

The more useful methods for assessing the fakeability of self-report measures given in Gordon and Gross (1978) are presented along with descriptions of two alternative measures of faking. These measures all assume that faking is being examined in a repeated measures design where subjects typically are asked to respond honestly on one administration of a scale, and are asked to fake on another administration. Since faking that is due to constant discrepancy over an entire group is of minor importance in most practical situations, the discussion focuses primarily on individual differences in faking. The most useful measure of individual differences in faking was operationalized by the variance of difference scores across subjects. This measure is shown to be less sensitive to detecting forms of individual differences in faking that are measured by the proposed within-subject measures. The proposed methods are described, and empirical support for their sensitivity to individual differences in faking is presented.