Short form development of the Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding: Applying confirmatory factor analysis, item response theory, and cognitive interviews to scale reduction

Abstract The Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding (BIDR) is one of the most commonly used measures of socially desirable responding. It consists of two subscales, Self-Deceptive Enhancement (SDE) and Impression Management (IM), containing 20 statements each, answered on a 7-point scale. The purpose of this paper was to analyze the items on the SDE and IM for a suggested short form version of the scale. Three studies were conducted using the Icelandic version of the BIDR. The first study (N = 579) focused on analyzing the items using Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) and Item Response Theory (IRT), the second study (N = 471) examined the effects of faking instructions on an item level and in the third study (N = 20) Cognitive Interviews (CI) with probing were used in order to identify problematic items. Based on results from CFA, IRT, the effects of instructional variations and CI, a short form version of the BIDR-6 was introduced, containing 12 SDE items and 12 IM items. The results suggest that the psychometric properties of measurements obtained with the short form version were adequate.