Benford’s Law as an Instrument for Fraud Detection in Surveys Using the Data of the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP)
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Jörg-Peter Schräpler
Summary
This paper focuses on fraud detection in surveys using Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) data as an example for testing newly methods proposed here. A statistical theorem referred to as Benford’s Law states that in many sets of numerical data, the significant digits are not uniformly distributed, as one might expect, but adhere to a certain logarithmic probability function. In order to detect fraud, we derive several requirements that should, according to this law, be fulfilled in the case of survey data.We show that in several SOEP subsamples, Benford’s Law holds for the available continuous data. For this analysis, we developed a measure that reflects the plausibility of the digit distribution in interviewer clusters. We are thus able to demonstrate that several interviews that were known to have been fabricated and therefore deleted in the original user data set can now be detected using this method. Furthermore, in one subsample, we use this method to identify a case of an interviewer falsifying ten interviews not previously detected by the fieldwork organization.
© 2011 by Lucius & Lucius, Stuttgart
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Titelei
- Inhalt / Contents
- Guest Editorial
- Abhandlungen / Original Papers
- The Production of Historical “Facts”: How the Wrong Number of Participants in the Leipzig Monday Demonstration on October 9, 1989 Became a Convention
- “True Believers” or Numerical Terrorism at the Nuclear Power Plant
- One-eyed Epidemiologic Dummies at Nuclear Power Plants
- Are Most Published Research Findings False?
- What Fuels Publication Bias?
- The Identification and Prevention of Publication Bias in the Social Sciences and Economics
- Benford’s Law as an Instrument for Fraud Detection in Surveys Using the Data of the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP)
- When Does the Second-Digit Benford’s Law-Test Signal an Election Fraud?
- Difficulties Detecting Fraud? The Use of Benford’s Law on Regression Tables
- Plagiarism in Student Papers: Prevalence Estimates Using Special Techniques for Sensitive Questions
- Pitfalls of International Comparative Research: Taking Acquiescence into Account
- Buchbesprechungen / Book Reviews
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Titelei
- Inhalt / Contents
- Guest Editorial
- Abhandlungen / Original Papers
- The Production of Historical “Facts”: How the Wrong Number of Participants in the Leipzig Monday Demonstration on October 9, 1989 Became a Convention
- “True Believers” or Numerical Terrorism at the Nuclear Power Plant
- One-eyed Epidemiologic Dummies at Nuclear Power Plants
- Are Most Published Research Findings False?
- What Fuels Publication Bias?
- The Identification and Prevention of Publication Bias in the Social Sciences and Economics
- Benford’s Law as an Instrument for Fraud Detection in Surveys Using the Data of the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP)
- When Does the Second-Digit Benford’s Law-Test Signal an Election Fraud?
- Difficulties Detecting Fraud? The Use of Benford’s Law on Regression Tables
- Plagiarism in Student Papers: Prevalence Estimates Using Special Techniques for Sensitive Questions
- Pitfalls of International Comparative Research: Taking Acquiescence into Account
- Buchbesprechungen / Book Reviews
