Masking effects of social desirability response set on relations between psychosocial factors and sport injuries: a...

Social desirability has long been viewed as a potential source of error variance in self-report measures. We suggest that social desirability (whether in the form of impression management or self-deception) has the capacity to mask relations between psychosocial variables and sport-related outcome or criterion measures that are not measured by selfreport. To illustrate what can occur, we present data from a longitudinal study in which life stress and psychological coping skills were studied as predictors of behaviorally-defined athletic injuries. When data from the entire sample of 352 athletes were analyzed, virtually no injury variance was accounted for by life stress, psychological coping skills, or their interaction. In contrast, deletion from the sample of athletes with high social desirability response set scores resulted in significant predictive relations involving both life stress and coping skills, as well as a significant moderator effect for coping skills. We propose that social desirability masking effects can significantly increase the likelihood of Type II errors in sports medicine research that involves self-report measures, and that social desirability responding needs to be controlled or minimized.