In survey design workshops, we are often asked if rating scales designed to measure respondents\u2019 opinions and attitudes should have an odd number of points, including a neutral mid-point (i.e., \u201cNeither agree or disagree\u201d); or if it\u2019s better to have an even number of points, without a mid-point. \u00a0Our answer, which probably frustrates our\u00a0participants to no end, is \u201cit depends.\u201d\u00a0 You have to clearly think through what a \u201cneutral\u201d answer means and choose accordingly. Here is a link to a clever blog entry by Jane Davidson that makes this point very well and gives you ways to think about how many points your rating scales should have:<\/p>\n
Boxers or briefs? Why having a favorite response scale makes no sense<\/a><\/p>\n (There are some insightful readers’ comments to this blog post that you might find interesting as well.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In survey design workshops, we are often asked if rating scales designed to measure respondents\u2019 opinions and attitudes should have an odd number of points, including a neutral mid-point (i.e., \u201cNeither agree or disagree\u201d); or if it\u2019s better to have an even number of points, without a mid-point. \u00a0Our answer, which probably frustrates our\u00a0participants to… Read More »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2959,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-807","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8ICUo-d1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/nec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/807","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/nec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/nec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/nec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2959"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/nec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=807"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/nec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/807\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6597,"href":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/nec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/807\/revisions\/6597"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/nec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=807"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/nec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=807"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/nec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=807"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}