Automatic Identification of Faked and Fraudulent Interviews in the German SOEP

Based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), this paper presents two new tools for the identification of faked interviews in surveys. One method is based on Benford's Law, and the other exploits the empirical observation that fakers most often produce answers with less variability than could be expected from the whole survey. We focus on fabricated data, which was taken out of the survey before the data was disseminated to external users. For two samples, the resulting rankings of the interviewers with respect to their cheating behavior are given. For both methods all of the evident fakers are identified.