Identifying single-item faked responses in personality tests: A new TF-IDF-based method

Faking in a psychological test is often observed whenever an examinee may gain an advantage from it. Although techniques are available to identify a faker, they cannot identify the specific questions distorted by faking. This work evaluates the effectiveness of term frequency-inverse document freque...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2022-08, Vol.17 (8), p.e0272970-e0272970
Main Authors: Purpura, Alberto, Giorgianni, Dora, Orrù, Graziella, Melis, Giulia, Sartori, Giuseppe
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Biology and Life Sciences
Employment interviews
Evaluation
Information processing
Information retrieval
Inventory
Likert scale
Management
Mathematical analysis
Medicine and Health Sciences
Personality
Personality tests
Physical Sciences
Psychological assessment
Psychological tests
Questionnaires
Research and Analysis Methods
Search engines
Social Sciences
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Summary:Faking in a psychological test is often observed whenever an examinee may gain an advantage from it. Although techniques are available to identify a faker, they cannot identify the specific questions distorted by faking. This work evaluates the effectiveness of term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF)—an information retrieval mathematical tool used in search engines and language representations—in identifying single-item faked responses. We validated the technique on three datasets containing responses to the 10-item Big Five questionnaire (total of 694 participants, respectively 221, 243, and 230) in three faking situations. Each participant responded twice, once faking to achieve an objective in one of three contexts (one to obtain child custody and two to land a job) and once honestly. The proposed TF-IDF model has proven very effective in separating honest from dishonest responses—with the honest ones having low TF-IDF values and the dishonest ones having higher values—and in identifying which of the 10 responses to the questionnaire were distorted in the dishonest condition. We also provide examples of the technique in a single-case evaluation.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0272970