Exam 7: Measurement and Scaling

Internal consistency reliability values for single-item or two-item scales cannot be accurately determined and should not be reported as representing the scale's internal consistency.

Which of the following is true about a semantic differential scale?

A(n) _____ includes two or more different attributes or issues in the same question, but responses allow respondents to comment on only a single issue.

The more scale points, the lesser the discriminatory power of a scale.

A _____ is a hypothetical variable made up of a set of component responses or behaviors that are thought to be related.

A nominal scale enables respondents to express relative magnitude between the answers to a question and responses can be rank-ordered in a hierarchical pattern.

What are the two factors that drive the use of multiple-item scales in research?

A researcher working at Arcade Inc. is interested in finding out people's perception of Arcade's prices and quality relative to those of its top market rival. Given this objective, which of the following would prove to be most efficient?

Only ordinal data can be obtained using rank-order scales.

At the heart of construct development is the need to determine exactly what is to be measured.

Which of the following statements is true of leading questions?

For interval scales, it is not possible to calculate mean and standard deviation.

In most cases, semantic differential scales use either 5 or 7 scale points.

A feature is an abstract construct if it can be directly measured using physical characteristics.

Internal consistency is the degree to which the individual questions of a construct are correlated.

Discuss the difference between a concrete variable and an abstract construct.

Measures of central tendency describe how data are dispersed around a central value.

Which of the following statements about constructs is true?

The _____ represents the distance between the largest and smallest response.

The idea behind the test-retest approach to measuring the reliability of scales is that if random variations are present, they will be revealed by variations in the scores between the two sampled measurements.