Estimation of a sensitive proportion by Warner’s randomized response data through inverse sampling

It is difficult to obtain trustworthy data on stigmatizing matters like habits of tax evasion, drunken driving, etc., through direct queries. To overcome this difficulty, Warner introduced randomized response techniques to estimate the proportion of people bearing such a stigmatizing or sensitive characteristic in a given community. For simplicity in estimation he restricted to SRSWR and since then, several researchers have extended and applied this technique in various ways. All these results involve sampling with a pre-fixed number of draws. In this paper we employ inverse sampling with equal probabilities with replacement and show certain advantages in estimation using randomized response data by Warner’s device gathered through such a simple inverse sampling scheme.