Overcoming Teacher's Social Desirability in Survey Research

The present research focuses on analysis of psychometric properties of the Russian version of TALIS scale of social desirability (SD). It would allow for using this instrument in other teacher’s survey. This paper presents a review of the literature, confirming the existence of SD in surveys of teachers. The necessity of the use of SD scale in surveys of teachers is demonstrated. It is shown that the instrument used to measure the level of SD in the TALIS survey did not adapted to the Russian-language sample and the methods used to test its psychometric properties have some limitations. The sample included teachers who participated in TALIS-2013 (N=3972) aged between 19 and 76 (87% of women). Analysis is done with IRT. There are several problems in the functioning of the scale. First, it is insufficient level of reliability. Second, it is unsatisfactory functioning of the response categories. The increase of response categories is not accompanied by increase of the level of respondents’ SD level. Moreover, some items are functioning as a dichotomous with two extreme categories «strongly agree» and «strongly disagree». The paper discusses the possibility of regrouping of response categories and provides recommendations to improve the psychometric properties of the TALIS scale of SD. Keywords: Social desirability scale, teacher’s survey, TALIS, psychometric properties.