Hello,

I wish to help, but I have a few questions

- what do you mean by 7-point likert items?

- what are the three groups consisting of?

- is the question general or about a real case? please be more specific if the latter.

Samer Attrah

Oh, sorry for the confusion. Here is the detail of my study.

I am conducting research about the reader's stance. Stance is what readers pay attention to when they read a text. In my research, I examined three stances, trying to find out what stance readers adopt when they read a certain type of text.

I relied on previous descriptions in the literature to devise a number of statements that align with the descriptions. After that, I asked participants to rate their level of agreement with such statements, ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree).

I am wondering if there is any kind of analysis that can be employed to classify a participant into a certain stance (in the three stances) based on their agreement with the statements.

Assuming that "the description" you mention is the stance description, please correct me if I am wrong because the topic you are working on is totally new to me.

By that, I can understand that you are looking to find a pattern that connects the rating (1-7) with the stance group (A,B,C), and looking for an approach to predict the stance of the participant by only knowing their rating.

I would suggest starting with visualizing the data you have and you will get three clusters, and maybe collecting more information about the participants, such as age, education, scientific interests, and any other information that would help to expect the interest of the reader in the text you are providing. and then use these features (information) in building a classification model. or a clustering model depending on what you will have then.

I hope that helps