Deck 3: Sychological Scaling

Question 1

Alexis is assessing employee's job performance levels by having supervisor rank each of their employees from highest to lowest in terms of their performance. This form of performance assessment represents a(n) _________ level of measurement.

A) ordinal
B) interval
C) ratio
D) nominal

Answer 1

A

Question 2

When the primary goal of a test or assessment is to scale respondents (i.e., examining for individual differences), then the focus of our scaling efforts is primarily on scaling _______.

A) stimuli
B) responses
C) items
D) individuals

Answer 2

D

Question 3

When the primary goal of a testing study is to scale stimuli (psychological scaling), then we would want to have a(n) ___________.

A) random sample of respondents
B) small group of subject matter experts
C) stratified cluster sampling of respondents
D) extremely large sample (N>100) of respondents

Answer 3

B

Question 4

Typically, when developing a new measure of a construct, which of the following is likely to occur first?

A) Determining the sample size
B) Conducting a study to scale the questions
C) Conducting a study to assess the desired respondents
D) Estimating the alpha reliability coefficient for the scale

Question 5

Which of the following techniques is considered a stimulus scaling method for interval levels of measurement?

A) Q-Sort Method
B) Guttman's Scalogram
C) Coomb's Unfolding Technique
D) Thurstone's Method of Comparative Judgment

Question 6

If a researcher was conducting a study related to consumer preferences for multiple products and had respondents note their preferences, however they were not able to articulate why they preferred one product over another, which of the following procedures would be most beneficial to the researcher?

A) Multidimensional Scaling
B) Guttman Scalogram Technique
C) Multiple Paired Comparisons Method
D) Thurstone's Method of Comparative Judgment

Question 7

A psychologist measuring parenting style as: Authoritarian, authoritative, and permissive, is measuring parenting style with a(n) ______ level of measurement.

A) nominal
B) ordinal
C) interval
D) ratio

Question 8

Many schools rank their graduates each year from highest to lowest. In fact, at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland the students line up for graduation based on their class ranking (i.e., everyone knows who is first and last!). Graduates wind up with scores such as 14 or 131. Such a scale is one example of a(n) _________ scale.

A) nominal
B) ordinal
C) interval
D) ratio

Question 9

If you wanted to determine the "typical" value for a nominally scaled variable such as self-reported race, the most appropriate statistic to compute would be the ______.

A) mean
B) median
C) mode
D) weighted mean

Question 10

Why is it important that subject matter experts (SMEs) have a common definition of the construct the researcher plans to develop?

Question 11

Why is it important to know the level of measurement of your scales?

Question 12

What is the difference between psychometrics and psychological scaling?

Question 13

When might having a nominal or categorical level of measurement be sufficient for a psychometric project?

Question 14

What are the major advantages and disadvantages of multidimensional scaling (MDS)?