title: The Marlowe-Crowne affair: short forms, psychometric structure, and social desirability.
abstract: The Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability scale (Crowne & Marlowe, 1960) is widely used to assess and control for response bias in self-report research. Several abbreviated versions of the Marlowe-Crowne scale have been proposed and adopted in psychology and medicine. In this article I evaluate the adequacy of 9 short forms using confirmatory factor analysis across 2 samples (combined N = 867). There was some evidence for the adequacy of different short forms, but model adequacy was not consistent across samples. Supplementary analyses revealed a multidimensional structure to the full Marlowe-Crowne scale and indicated that the apparent adequacy of model fit for some short forms might be a statistical artifact. Using the Marlowe-Crowne scale or its various short forms as a control for response bias is discouraged on empirical and conceptual grounds.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff 86011, USA. steven.barger@nau.edu
authors.forename: Steven D
authors.initials: SD
authors.lastname: Barger
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D005163:Factor Analysis, Statistical; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D010556:Personality Tests; D011594:Psychometrics; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012928:Social Desirability; D014481:United States