Applying Benford's Law for assessing the validity of social science data

Abstract

Benford's Law is a probability distribution for the likelihood of the leading digit in a set of numbers. This book seeks to improve and systematize the use of Benford's Law in the social sciences to assess the validity of self-reported data. The authors first introduce a new measure of conformity to the Benford distribution that is created using permutation statistical methods and employs the concept of statistical agreement. In a switch from a typical Benford application, this book moves away from using Benford's Law to test whether the data conform to the Benford distribution, to using it to draw conclusions about the validity of the data. The concept of 'Benford validity' is developed, which indicates whether a dataset is valid based on comparisons with the Benford distribution and, in relation to this, diagnostic procedure that assesses the impact of not having Benford validity on data analysis is devised.