Advances of the Non-Randomized Response Techniques in Sample Surveys with Sensitive Questions

In many social, economic, medical, psychological and political surveys, they often involve some highly sensitive questions. Since such questions refer to individuals' privacy and may make them feel embarrassed, they are likely to refuse to respond or, even worse, provide false answers if been asked directly. Therefore, it is of great important to develop appropriate models to encourage truthful answers as well as protecting privacy. Compared to the conventional randomized response techniques, the non-randomized response approaches have advantages such as the reproducibility, the cost economized, wide range of application and so on. In this paper, we make a brief review and comparison for the nine newly developed non-randomized response approaches during the last decade, aiming at guiding researchers to choose the most appropriate ways to collect sensitive information.