NORMATIVE ANALYSIS AND STATISTICAL TREATMENT/VALIDITY OF THE LIKERT SCALE

Peter J Stavroulakis

3RD INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON QUANTITATIVE AND QUALITATIVE METHODOLOGIES IN THE ECONOMIC AND ADMINISTRATIVE SCIENCES

MAY 23-24 2013, TEI OF ATHENS, GREECE

What happens when we are asked to portray our emotions?

A question is posed...

How do you feel about mathematics?

Well...let me think...

There was this time in school, I tried to learn the limit definition and found it too difficult to grasp

This experience formulated my emotions towards math and a subsequent bias...

Math was kind of an alien topic and created a feeling of loathing...

But...

Some years after that there was this one time that mathematics saved me...

Etc... Etc... Etc...

From all our experiences we will perform a sort of internal appraisal...

...in order to extract a response

The mechanics?

The domain of the variable?

Plutchik (1980)

From a continuous variable we extract a sample

Discretization

Classes and class marks

Sampling on a model

Processes

Discretization Sampling theory Analog to digital conversion? Central Limit Theorem?

The Likert scale performs an implicit discretization of emotion

Implicit because it measures intensity

Mathematics inspire admiration

The Likert Scale

Interval? Ordinal?

“The average of ‘fair’ and ‘good’ is not‘fair‐and‐a‐half’; which is true even whenone assigns integers to represent ‘fair’ and ‘good’!”

Jamieson (2004)

But if we perform discretization of the domain under equal intervals does it matter that the average of ‘fair’ and ‘good’ is not‘fair‐and‐a‐half’?

Issues

Need to investigate the matter further from the subjects’ perspective

Extract a model for particular kinds of attitude instruments

Pair model with experimental data

Thank you for your attention!