Quantitative Psychology Commons^™

In Search Of Equality: Developing An Equal Interval Likert Response Scale, Elisabeth M. Spratto

Dissertations, 2014-2019

Attitude scales are an important component of educational and psychological research. One consideration when seeking to make valid inferences from attitudinal data is the issue of the degree to which response options can be assumed to have equal intervals. Many response options on attitudinal measures may produce ordinal-level data rather than interval. This poses a problem for the statistical tests that may be used, as many analyses assume interval-level data. It also poses an interpretational issue if the conceptual distance between response options is not the same – for example, if a researcher believes that someone who answered Agree differs …