ABSTRACT

The process of responding to a rating scale should be viewed as a communication between the test developer's intentions (as expressed in the items and their associated response categories) and the respondents' record of their attitudes, behaviors, or achievement on the construct of interest. It is common knowledge that the way each rating scale is constructed has a great influence on the quality of data obtained from the scale (Clark & Schober, 1992). That is, some categorizations of variables yield higher quality measures than other categorizations (Linacre, 1999a; Wright & Linacre, 1992). Thus, not only should rating scales reflect careful consideration of the construct in question, but they also should be conveyed with categories and labels that elicit unambiguous responses. Even after great care has been taken to develop an unambiguous rating scale, the assumptions about both the quality of the measures and the utility of the rating scale in facilitating interpretable measures should be tested empirically.