Negative effects of unlabeled response scales

This study used a novel research approach to investigate the effects of unlabeled response scales on response distributions.

Introduction

Questionnaire item response categories have attracted considerable research attention. There are studies of response scale length (e.g., Dawes, 2008), verbal compared to numerical response category labels (e.g., Bendixen & Yurova, 2012), verbal compared to visual labels (e.g., Gummer et al., 2020), and verbal compared to no labels (e.g., Krosnick & Berent, 1993). Previous research has found that labeling each response category (full labeling) improves the validity (e.g., Krosnick & Berent, 1993), reliability (e.g., Menold et al., 2014; Peters & McCormick, 1966), and statistical power (e.g., Eutsler & Lang, 2015) of questionnaire items compared to unlabeled response categories. However, some...

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