well, glad you asked ... one of the best treatments of this question you
have raised was a small handout done by bob frary (retired from vpi) on
?airre development ... and lucky for you there is a url to this
http://www.testscoring.vt.edu/fraryquest.html
bob has a nice little section on the ? or neutral kind of category ....
though bob's paper was not meant for psychological scales or attitude
scales ... the comments about this "problem" response category are relevant ...
i think most would agree (assuming there is no other way to respond) ...
and surveys or scales that use a ? or neutral category for a response
possibility for items ... IF SOMEONE RESPONDS THAT WAY ... is the most
ambiguous of the response categories (not that we are all that confident on
ONE item even if they respond SA or SD) ...
again, take a look at the paper above ... you would want to scroll down the
topic of: Responses to the Scale Midpoint ...
At 11:13 AM 1/4/01 +0000, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>Hi
>
>I need some professional advice on a statistics question. I recently took
>part
>in a survey where the scale of responses was given as:
>
>Agree / Tend to Agree / ? / Tend to Disagree / Disagree
>
>The question mark in the middle seems very ambiguous to me. Can anyone
>tell me
>if this is a commonly used scale, and if so, what is the question mark
>supposed
>to mean?
>
>Appreciate any help you can give me
>
>
>James
>
>
>=================================================================
>Instructions for joining and leaving this list and remarks about
>the problem of INAPPROPRIATE MESSAGES are available at
> http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/
>=================================================================
=============
dennis roberts, educational psychology
penn state university, 208 cedar building
university park, pa USA 16802 ... AC 8148632401
[EMAIL PROTECTED] ... http://roberts.ed.psu.edu/users/droberts/drober~1.htm
=================================================================
Instructions for joining and leaving this list and remarks about
the problem of INAPPROPRIATE MESSAGES are available at
http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/
=================================================================
