ABSTRACT
Scaling consists of measuring and comparing objects in some meaningful way. The process includes some visual representation, usually a linear or multidimensional map. In the social sciences, researchers are continually trying to measure and compare human perceptions. They create scales by assigning psychological objects to numbers and then locate individuals on the scale they have created. Psychological objects can be colors, words, tones, and sentences as well as houses, gold stars, and names or pictures of television stars. Generally, Euclidian space provides a framework within which numbers can be assigned to objects in a relative but meaningful way. The use of one-dimensional space is demonstrated by the scaling of lowercase letters of the English alphabet on a unidimensional or linear scale. If the task requires judgments, methods are used to assign meaningful numbers to the objects. From such an analysis, a subset or subsets of the objects are chosen and formulated into a scaling instrument.
