Purpose: Evidence from past surveys suggests that some interviewees simplify their responses even in very well-organized and highly respected surveys. This paper aims to demonstrate that some interviewers, too, simplify their task by at least partly fabricating their data, and that, in some survey research institutes, employees simplify their task…

Purpose: Fabricated data jeopardize the reliability of large-scale population surveys and reduce the comparability of such efforts by destroying the linkage between data and measurement constructs. Such data result in the loss of comparability across participating countries and, in the case of cyclical surveys, between past and present surveys.…