A versatile optional randomized response technique for use with sensitive surveys

In data collection from human participants, researchers in almost every survey get refusals and/or false responses from the respondents. Such refusals and false reporting are particularly common in sample surveys where the participants are asked to answer questions on sensitive topics such as cheating in examination, illegal income, marks obtained in last examination, students’ satisfaction from the teaching method, and amount of money spent on luxury items, etc. A popular approach to deal with the problem of refusals and untruthful responses is the randomized response technique. This paper introduces a randomized response model which is more precise than the available models. The proposed randomized scrambling procedure guarantees the privacy protection of the respondents for motivating them to participate in the survey.