I think perhaps you are using slightly incorrect terms in your question which makes it difficult for people to understand. Are you talking about the number of items (variables) which go to make up your scales, the number of different response values for each item or the number of scales you end up with after using a dimension reduction technique, such as a reliability analysis?
Dear Peter first thank for your concern i am talking about likert scale some cases you need to give the respondent 5 answers and some other cases maybe 3 answer for each item I hope my question become clear for you and everybody?
If all the questions are going to be used to generate one score, then you can just assign scores to the answers (say 5=Very Good, 4= Good, 3= Average, 2 = Bad, 1= Worse) and then sum all the scores to generate a score. The 3 item response will have scores of 3, 2, 1 too. You can then perform analysis using the score. In this case higher score will mean a good thing. You can make good be smaller scores too, it is all up to you.
I hope this is what you are looking for. If not then provide a little bit more context to your question so we can know exactly what you want.
Refer to answer given by Mr.Eric. It is easy to convert 5 point scale into 3 point scale. In 5 point scale, you can get the score as 5,4,3,2 and 1. Here, treat 4,5=3; 3=2 and 1,2=1. The 3 point scale can have score 3,2 and 1. After conversion, all items have same scale. It is possible to convert the scale and carry out the further analysis.
Using different scales for different items implies that you are giving different weightages to positive and negative answers. A positive answer in 5 point scale could be 5 or 4 while negative answer could be 1 and 2, 3 being the neutral answer. Now in 5 point scale, any positive answer compare to neutral answer of 3 will get the weightages of 5/3 (1.66) or 4/3 (1.33) while in 3 point scale any positive answer will get the weightages of 3/2 (1.5) compare to the neutral answer of 2. Similarly you can show the difference in weightages of negative answers in 5 point scale and 3 point scale. In view of this, it is suggested that you should first convert the 5 point scale to 3 point and then carry out the further analysis.