How respondents use verbal and numeric rating scales: a case for rescaling
Michael Bendixen and Yuliya Yurova
Nova Southeastern University
Introduction
Market researchers and academics researching in the social sciences are mainly concerned with measuring attitudes, beliefs, perceptions and behaviours. As such, they are largely confined to using verbal and numeric rating and ranking scales in their survey instruments. The way in which respondents use these scales and the arithmetic properties of the scales is of critical importance when selecting the appropriate methods of analysis. Most of these scales are ordinal in nature, which severely limits the methods...