Measuring Social Desirability: Short Forms of the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale

A practical difficulty with the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale (SDS) is its length. Preferring a shorter measure of social desirability, researchers have devised a number of short forms of the SDS. The present study used confirmatory factor analysis to establish the adequacy of these subscales in measuring social desirability. Results showed that (a) of the six short forms of SDS considered two models (XI and X2) provide the best measures of social desirability, (b) improved measures of all of the models can be constructed, and (c) improved measures of the dimensions, denial and attribution, thought to measure the latent construct of social approval can also be constructed.