Don't take David's remarks too seriously. Either he was writing with tongue firmly embedded in cheek, or he was being more than usually curmudgeonly. See my comments on his comments, below:
On Wed, 25 Jun 2003, Dianne Worth wrote: > I found the answer to my own question: One would subtract/add 4 to > the -3/+3 scaling, NOT based on whether the statement was positively > or negatively worded, but because the Likert-type scale had (for > example) Extremely Unlikely as -3 and Extremely Likely as +3 for one > statement; but as +3 and -3 in another part of the questionnaire. > This converts them so they are all headed in the same direction. Rich Ulrich has already commented on THIS point. > As far as your comment about the holy water (I like that!), does the > following clarify? "..assume that, on the basis of a great deal of > prior experience in encoding, the terms 'extremely,' 'quite,' and > 'slightly as linguistic quantifiers have been associated with more > or less equal degrees of intensity.." (Osgood, et. al. 1957, p. 29) < snip > > --- David Heiser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> had written: > > Wow!! > > I didn't know you could take nominal data, Semantic differential data are ordinarily AT LEAST ordinal, and are often not far from interval-scale; at least, not far enough for the departure to be noticeable in the general noise. > > sprinkle a little holy water (from your supervising professor's > > closet) and lo and behold it becomes ratio data that can be analyzed > > by regression analysis. Regression analysis pretty well wants interval-scale data, at least approximately; it does NOT require ratio-scale data. < snip, the rest > ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Donald F. Burrill [EMAIL PROTECTED] 56 Sebbins Pond Drive, Bedford, NH 03110 (603) 626-0816 . . ================================================================= Instructions for joining and leaving this list, remarks about the problem of INAPPROPRIATE MESSAGES, and archives are available at: . http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/ . =================================================================
