I have administered a 15statement attitude questionnaire with agree/ disagree response codes. The scale was developed as per method of Thurstone scale construction. I am finding mixed approaches to interpret the data:
1. one approach says just count the number of agree statements and that is a person's attitude score or take their percent
2. second approach says that the score for each statement is the median for that statement at the time of scale construction
Can anyone please guide on what is the right appraoch?
Many thanks!
Vibha Gupta - After generating a series of agree-disagree statements about the subject that ask support the issue to varying degrees. Assign each statement a score of 1 to 15 based on how strong you believe the statement is. A higher score indicates a more supportive position, while a lower score indicates a more neutral position. If you’re working in a study group, have each member score how strong they believe the statements are. Find the median score given to each question and then order your questions in ascending order, with the questions with the lowest medians at the top.
The Thurstone scale is used for surveying the level of agreement concerning emotions, opinions, and attitudes. The first method you mentioned does NOT involve item analysis and selection and should be avoided under most circumstances. The second method was mentioned by Dr Manzoor Hussain and is the more legitimate or CORRECT method.
What you need to do is to get a panel of judges to rate your items/statements from 1 (strongly disagree) to 11 (strongly agree), compute the median and interquartile range (Q3 - Q1) for EACH item, and then SELECT out final items with the lowest interquartile range for each median category of each item. By doing this, you would get a final selection of items with little discrepancy in item ratings/weights among judges. With this set of final items, you administer them to your participants and carry out computing the percentage of agreement for each subject, as mentioned in Method 1.
Appended below is a URL for your reference: https://www.questionpro.com/blog/thurstone-scale/
Please accept my sincere apologies Dr. Jimmy Y. Zhong . I am truly sorry.
Would you be kind enough to answer a follow-up question?
Is reverse scoring done for Thurstone scale as well? I am aware that it is done for Likert scale, but I am unable to find literature regarding Thurstone scale.
Your response would be deeply appreciated.
Warm regards,
Vibha@
Yes, of course, reverse score any negatively phrased questions before doing the median and interquartile computations.
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