sgr: A Package for Simulating Conditional Fake Ordinal Data

Authors

Luigi Lombardi, University of Trento
Massimiliano Pastore, University of Padova

Date of this Version

6-2014

Document Type

Article

Citation

The R Journal (June 2014) 6(1); Editor: Deepayan Sarkar

Comments

Copyright 2014, The R Foundation. Open access material. License: CC BY 3.0 Unported

Abstract

Many self-report measures of attitudes, beliefs, personality, and pathology include items that can be easily manipulated by respondents. For example, an individual may deliberately attempt to manipulate or distort responses to simulate grossly exaggerated physical or psychological symptoms in order to reach specific goals such as, for example, obtaining financial compensation, avoiding being charged with a crime, avoiding military duty, or obtaining drugs. This article introduces the package sgr that can be used to perform fake data analysis according to the sample generation by replacement approach. The package includes functions for making simple inferences about discrete/ordinal fake data. The package allows to quantify uncertainty in inferences based on possible fake data as well as to study the implications of fake data for empirical results.