Social desirability reporting leads to over estimations of church attendance. To date, researchers have treated over-reporting of church attendance as a general phenomenon, and have been unable to determine the demographic correlates of inaccuracy in these self-reports. By comparing over eight months of observational data on church attendance (n = 48 services) to self-report in a rural Fijian village, we find that 1) self-report does not reliably predict observed attendance, 2) women with two or more children (≥ 2) are more likely to over-report their attendance than women with fewer children (≤ 1), and 3) self-report of religiosity more reliably predicts observed church attendance than does self-report of church attendance. Further, we find that third-party judgements of church attendance by fellow villagers are more reliably associated with observed church attendance than self-report. Our findings suggest that researchers interested in estimating behavioral variation, particularly in domains susceptible to social desirability effects, should consider developing and employing third-party methods to mitigate biases inherent to self-report.

Centre for Research on Evolution Belief and Behaviour University of Otago Otago New Zealand

Laboratory for the Experimental Research of Religion Masaryk University Brno Czechia

Religion Programme School of Social Sciences University of Otago Otago New Zealand

Sociology Programme School of Social Sciences University of Otago Otago New Zealand

See more in PubMed

Bernard HR, Killworth P, Kronenfeld D, Sailer L. The problem of informant accuracy: The validity of retrospective data. Annu Rev Anthropol. 1984;13: 495–517.

Placek CD, Srinivas V, Jayakrishna P, Madhivanan P. Mixed-methods and Repeated Measures in Substance Use Research: Implications for Informant Accuracy. Field Methods. 2019;31: 344–358.

Bradburn NM, Rips LJ, Shevell SK. Answering autobiographical questions: The impact of memory and inference on surveys. Science. 1987;236: 157–161. doi: 10.1126/science.3563494 PubMed DOI

Sudman S, Bradburn NM. Effects of time and memory factors on response in surveys. J Am Stat Assoc. 1973;68: 805–815.

Brenner PS. Exceptional behavior or exceptional identity? Overreporting of church attendance in the US. Public Opin Q. 2011;75: 19–41.

Shweder RA, D’Andrade RG. The systematic distortion hypothesis. New Dir Methodol Soc Behav Sci. 1980;4: 37–58.

Presser S, Stinson L. Data collection mode and social desirability bias in self-reported religious attendance. Am Sociol Rev. 1998; 137–145.

Sackeim HA, Gur RC. Self-deception, other-deception, and self-reported psychopathology. J Consult Clin Psychol. 1979;47: 213. doi: 10.1037//0022-006x.47.1.213 PubMed DOI

Paulhus DL. Two-component models of socially desirable responding. J Pers Soc Psychol. 1984;46: 598.

Huang C, Liao H, Chang S. Social desirability and the Clinical Self‐Report Inventory: methodological reconsideration. J Clin Psychol. 1998;54: 517–528. doi: 10.1002/(sici)1097-4679(199806)54:4<517::aid-jclp13>3.0.co;2-i PubMed DOI

King MF, Bruner GC. Social desirability bias: A neglected aspect of validity testing. Psychol Mark. 2000;17: 79–103.

Weisner TS, Gallimore R, Tharp RG. Concordance between ethnographer and folk perspectives: Observed performance and self-ascription of sibling caretaking roles. Hum Organ. 1982; 237–244.

Fu H, Darroch JE, Henshaw SK, Kolb E. Measuring the extent of abortion underreporting in the 1995 National Survey of Family Growth. Fam Plann Perspect. 1998; 128–138. PubMed

Tooze JA, Subar AF, Thompson FE, Troiano R, Schatzkin A, Kipnis V. Psychosocial predictors of energy underreporting in a large doubly labeled water study. Am J Clin Nutr. 2004;79: 795–804. doi: 10.1093/ajcn/79.5.795 PubMed DOI

Stuckey HL, Kraschnewski JL, Miller-Day M, Palm K, Larosa C, Sciamanna C. “Weighing” Two Qualitative Methods: Self-report Interviews and Direct Observations of Participant Food Choices. Field Methods. 2014;26: 343–361.

Anderson JR. The moderating role of socially desirable responding in implicit–explicit attitudes toward asylum seekers. Int J Psychol. 2019;54: 1–7. doi: 10.1002/ijop.12439 PubMed DOI

Latkin CA, Vlahov D, Anthony JC. Socially desirable responding and self‐reported HIV infection risk behaviors among intravenous drug users. Addiction. 1993;88: 517–526. doi: 10.1111/j.1360-0443.1993.tb02058.x PubMed DOI

Babcock JC, Costa DM, Green CE, Eckhardt CI. What situations induce intimate partner violence? A reliability and validity study of the Proximal Antecedents to Violent Episodes (PAVE) scale. J Fam Psychol. 2004;18: 433. doi: 10.1037/0893-3200.18.3.433 PubMed DOI

DiFranceisco W, McAuliffe TL, Sikkema KJ. Influences of survey instrument format and social desirability on the reliability of self-reported high risk sexual behavior. AIDS Behav. 1998;2: 329–337.

Brown-Iannuzzi JL, Najle MB, Gervais WM. The illusion of political tolerance: Social desirability and self-reported voting preferences. Soc Psychol Personal Sci. 2019;10: 364–373.

Hadaway CK, Marler PL, Chaves M. What the polls don’t show: A closer look at US church attendance. Am Sociol Rev. 1993; 741–752.

Bauman A, Bittman M, Gershuny J. A short history of time use research; implications for public health. BMC Public Health. 2019;19: 607. doi: 10.1186/s12889-019-6760-y PubMed DOI PMC

Brenner PS. Identity importance and the overreporting of religious service attendance: Multiple imputation of religious attendance using the American Time Use Study and the General Social Survey. J Sci Study Relig. 2011;50: 103–115.

Brenner PS. Testing the veracity of self-reported religious practice in the Muslim world. Soc Forces. 2014;92: 1009–1037.

Brenner PS. Identity as a Determinant of the Overreporting of Church Attendance in Canada. J Sci Study Relig. 2012;51: 377–385.

Lawton MP. Methods and concepts for time-budget research on elders. Time use research in the social sciences. Springer; 2002. pp. 107–125.

Robinson JP. The Time-Diary Method. In: Pentland WE, Harvey AS, Lawton MP, McColl MA, editors. Time Use Research in the Social Sciences. Boston, MA: Springer US; 2002. pp. 47–89. doi: 10.1007/0-306-47155-8_3 DOI

Hardt J, Rutter M. Validity of adult retrospective reports of adverse childhood experiences: review of the evidence. J Child Psychol Psychiatry. 2004;45: 260–273. doi: 10.1111/j.1469-7610.2004.00218.x PubMed DOI

Balboni G, Coscarelli A, Giunti G, Schalock RL. The assessment of the quality of life of adults with intellectual disability: The use of self-report and report of others assessment strategies. Res Dev Disabil. 2013;34: 4248–4254. doi: 10.1016/j.ridd.2013.09.009 PubMed DOI

Shaver JH. The behavioral ecology of Fijian religion. University of Connecticut. 2012.

Nicholas LJ. The association between religiosity, sexual fantasy, participation in sexual acts, sexual enjoyment, exposure, and reaction to sexual materials among black South Africans. J Sex Marital Ther. 2004;30: 37–42. doi: 10.1080/00926230490247264 PubMed DOI

Nicholas L, Durrheim K. Religiosity, AIDS, and sexuality knowledge, attitudes, beliefs, and practices of black South-African first-year university students. Psychol Rep. 1995;77: 1328–1330. doi: 10.2466/pr0.1995.77.3f.1328 PubMed DOI

Rohr D, Wildman WJ, Sosis R, Bulbulia J, Schjoedt U, Daniels J, et al.. Reflections on the scientific study of religion after the first decade of Religion, Brain & Behavior. 2020.

Shaver JH. The evolution of stratification in Fijian ritual participation. Relig Brain Behav. 2015;5: 101–117. doi: 10.1080/2153599X.2014.893253 DOI

R Core Team. R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing. Vienna: R Foundation for Statistical Computing; 2020.

Bates DM, Maechler M, Bolker BM, Walker SC. Fitting linear mixed-effects models using lme4. J Stat Softw. 2015;67: 1–48. doi: 10.1177/009286150103500418 DOI

Van Buuren S. Flexible imputation of missing data. Boca Raton: Chapman & Hall/CRC; 2018.

Jaeger BC, Edwards LJ, Das K, Sen PK. An R2 statistic for fixed effects in the generalized linear mixed model. J Appl Stat. 2017;44: 1086–1105. doi: 10.1080/02664763.2016.1193725 DOI

Sosis R, Alcorta C. Signaling, solidarity, and the sacred: The evolution of religious behavior. Evol Anthropol Issues News Rev Issues News Rev. 2003;12: 264–274.

Burton S, Blair E. Task conditions, response formulation processes, and response accuracy for behavioral frequency questions in surveys. Public Opin Q. 1991;55: 50–79.

Vezzoni C, Biolcati F. Calibrating self-reported church attendance questions in online surveys. Experimental evidence from the Italian context. Soc Compass. 2019;66: 596–616.

Gervais WM, Najle MB. How many atheists are there? Soc Psychol Personal Sci. 2018;9: 3–10.

McNamara P, Sosis R, Wildman WJ. Announcing a new journal: Religion, Brain & Behavior. 2011.

Religious Involvement Is Associated With Higher Fertility and Lower Maternal Investment, but More Alloparental Support Among Gambian Mothers