At 08:18 AM 2/26/02 -0800, Jay Tanzman wrote: > > > > > > Not stressful 1__ 2__ 3__ 4__ 5__ 6__ 7__ Very stressful
these contain more information than simply ordinality ... they give you some indication of amount of stress too differentiate this sort of item and response from: rank order your preferences for the following foods: steak ___ ... 1 veal ____ ... 2 chicken ____ ... 4 fish ____ ... 5 pork ____ ... 3 and, assume it says to put 1 for the top 1 ... and 5 for the low one so, i do as above both CAN be thought of as ordering scales ... but, there is definitely MORE information in the not stressful to very stressful item and responses the end points of the 1 to 7 scale DO have meaning ... in terms of ABSOLUTE quantities that is not so for the food orderings ... can we infer that i don't like fish since i ranked it 5 and DO like steak since i ranked it one??? NOT necessarily there is a fundamental difference in the information you can extract from each of the examples above i see nothing inherently wrong with finding means on items like the stress item ... since means close to 1 or 7 ... do have some underlying referent to quantity of stress ... one cannot say that about the food preferences in terms of some underlying absolute liking or disliking of the foods Dennis Roberts, 208 Cedar Bldg., University Park PA 16802 <Emailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED]> WWW: http://roberts.ed.psu.edu/users/droberts/drober~1.htm AC 8148632401 ================================================================= Instructions for joining and leaving this list, remarks about the problem of INAPPROPRIATE MESSAGES, and archives are available at http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/ =================================================================
