To my knowledge the question mark is not commonly used and I think
confusing. What I have seen are the words "neither agree or disagree", "no
opinion" and others. They may have used it to save space. Judy Conn
-----Original Message-----
From: Bob Hayden [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Thursday, January 04, 2001 1:55 PM
To: EdStat-L
Subject: Scale on survey questionnaire (fwd)
----- Forwarded message from [EMAIL PROTECTED] -----
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?
----- End of forwarded message from [EMAIL PROTECTED] -----
It means the questioner has given up the right to average responses!-)
Since it is anyone's guess what "?" means, you would need to give
counts or percents for each response and leave it to the reader to
ponder what the "?" means. Whatever it means, it is not likely to be
a response on the same scale as the other choices. Personally, I
would think it would be better to provide more specific choices such
as "I don't understand the question", "I have no opinion", "I never
heard of the thing you are asking me about", "I don't know".
_
| | Robert W. Hayden
| | Work: Department of Mathematics
/ | Plymouth State College MSC#29
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