Abstract
Two studies were conducted to investigate how self-ratings on questionnaire items reflect the underlying real-scores. Participants gave numerical information about personal attributes (the real-scores), such as age, height, and weight, and subsequently rated themselves regarding these attributes. In Study 1, they rated themselves on a five-point Likert-type scale from three different ...
Abstract
Two studies were conducted to investigate how self-ratings on questionnaire items reflect the underlying real-scores. Participants gave numerical information about personal attributes (the real-scores), such as age, height, and weight, and subsequently rated themselves regarding these attributes. In Study 1, they rated themselves on a five-point Likert-type scale from three different perspectives, a personal, a general, and an outsiders', inducing three different frames of reference. By regressing these ratings on the real-scores, it was shown that information about means of and differences between the real-scores were not readily reflected by the response scales. The outsiders' perspective resulted in the most adequate representation of the real-score differences, indicated by the intervals between the categories estimated by the ordinal regression models. In Study 2, neutral item wording with a five-point Likert-type scale and a four-point Likert-type scale was used to rule out the effect of positive wording. This increased the adequacy of the representations just slightly. The findings indicate that, even on average, the investigated rating scales and items reflect the numeric real-scores only limitedly and that self-ratings depend on the item phrasing instead of simply representing a coarse measure of the real-scores. All data and analysis scripts are available at .
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