On #1, I was taught LIE-kert as an undergrad (and my mother learned it this
way in her grad work) but LICK-ert as a grad student. After further
investigation, Ken's statement is correct as best I can tell. It should be
LICK-ert. (And hey, some of my professors in grad school knew him, and so I
trust their pronunciation of his name.)
On #2, again I'm going to agree with what I think Ken is getting at. The
big question is one of instrumentation. Are the two groups using the scale
in the same way? My feeling is that when a participant approaches a scale
like this they form an idea in their mind that represents the mid-point.
They then use this imaginary mid-point to determine how they respond. Not
only could there be differences in interprtation between groups, there
could be lots of variation within a group... and hence lots of noise and
error in our measurements.
On a semi-related note, when I finally finish my dissertation I'm hoping to
revive some work on computer literacy I did a couple of years ago.
Basically, I was in the process of developing a new measure of computer
literacy and one of the things we looked at in the development was the
issue of gender differences. Basically, we kept hearing claims that "males
are more computer literate than females." Well, on the self-report portions
of our instrument, which used a Likert scale, there was a difference
between the genders. BUT, on the knowledge/application portion where
participants had to actually perform some tasks...or at least demonstrate
some knowledge about how to perform a task... there was NO difference.
(Okay, the average scores between males and females differed by less than
half a point on a scale of 0-50 so there was a "difference" but not a
meaningful one.)
Basically, it looked like one of two things was happening:
1) Females were less confident in their abilities to use a computer despite
being equally capable (which appeared to be the case given the manner in
which questions were asked.), or
2) Females interpretted and used the response scale differently than males
did, which brings us back to the point Ken was making (I think).
This was a side project I did on a whim in grad school so I never got to
really look at things as much as I would have liked...
Okay, back to working on the dissertation....
- Marc
G. Marc Turner, MEd
Lecturer & Head of Computer Operations
Department of Psychology
Southwest Texas State University
San Marcos, TX 78666
phone: (512)245-2526
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
