Minimising Social Desirability Bias in Construction Safety Risk Research

Although social desirability bias (SDB) is a threat to non-experimental research method which is widely applied in construction safety risk research, not many of studies looks into how to minimise the effect of SDB in the design and implementation of construction safety risk research. In this paper, we analysed the theoretical basis of SDB from the perspective of psychology, followed by a review of SDB in different applied research fields, the influencing factors, validation scales, and control techniques. Following that, we analysed the nature and characteristics of construction safety risk research, and proposed techniques for minimising SDB, which is focusing on alleviating psychological effects. The techniques proposed in this paper include indirect questions, permissive context, sequencing, confidentiality protection, timing and validation. Examples are provided to demonstrate the use of these techniques. We suggest that the techniques proposed in this paper should also be applicable to construction management research in general.