ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the different approaches to the development of meaningful scales. Researchers often use scales to assess unmeasurable constructs such as political participation or social power. The scales used most frequently in political science research are Likert scales and semantic differential scales. Political researchers often face the problem of having to measure complex, vague, or multidimensional concepts such as a person's political leaning or the level of anti-Americanism found in countries other than the United States. These concepts obviously cannot be measured with one simple question, and, to make matters even more complicated, often have different meanings in different nations or different cultural settings. The creation of scales provides researchers with a convenient method to combine a number of variables into one overall measure that can reflect a rather abstract concept. Scaling, or scale construction, is simply the procedure by which scales are built and individual scale scores are assigned.
