At 11:22 AM 9/7/01 -0400, Rich Ulrich wrote:
>I agree with Mike's opinion, above, that "Likert Scale" does
>not need to refer to attitudes, and that it still ought to imply
>that some amount of reliability testing has been performed.
well, i happen to take a different view ... and that is ... to honor the
context in which likert did his work ... and NOT confuse all kinds of other
uses of such response categories ... agree and disagree ... with his name
he work with what he considered attitudes ... affective dimensions ...
if we want to take it out of that realm ... then i think we should leave
likert's name out of it
for example ... what if we had an item on a stat test like:
the mean of the set of data ... 10, 9, 8, 7, 6 is ... 8.
A. I strongly agree with this
B. I agree with this
C. I am undecided on this
D. I disagree with this
E. I strongly disagree with this
or forgetting the problematic (as with attitude scales too) ? category
A. I strongly agree with this
B. I agree with this
C. I disagree with this
D. I strongly disagree with this
we could, i guess ... decide some way to score this item ... say ... either
by counting correct A and B and counting wrong C and D ... or,
differentially weighting A more than B ... and D less than C
and come up with an item score ... and sum across items to get a total test
score
but i certainly would NOT call this either a likert type item ... or a
likert scale ... that would be absurd
this is the problem ... we have so mixed up our use of the term likert ...
with dozens and dozens of things we do ... that, the term likert has taken
on meanings that were NOT intended by likert himself ... especially if you
look at HIS work
why should we mangle HIS usage so?
_________________________________________________________
dennis roberts, educational psychology, penn state university
208 cedar, AC 8148632401, mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://roberts.ed.psu.edu/users/droberts/drober~1.htm
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