Recently Dave was in Nigeria piloting a patient exit survey for health facilities, and we had a section similar to the one above. Watching the enumerator patiently try to explain, repeatedly, the difference between “strongly agree” and “agree” seemed painful for all involved. (Do you just agree? Or do you strongly agree? Yes, for the next statement, too.) So on the second day of piloting, we use a binary scale: Do you agree or disagree? It was much less painful, but what if all the variation in opinions was not between agreeing and disagreeing but rather in shades of agreement? Maybe this intervention takes people from mild enthusiasm for the clinic’s cleanliness to radical enthusiasm. On the other hand, how much of that variation is just noise?
There is a whole literature on this agree-disagree style of survey item, sometimes called a Likert item. When you tally up the responses across the items, that’s a Likert Scale. (That’s pronounced lick-ert, and has been called by Latham (2006) “among the most mispronounced in [his] field.”) The traditional Likert item has 5 choices: Strongly Disagree | Disagree | Neither agree nor disagree | Agree | Strongly Agree. But there are a range of design options.
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Recently Dave was in Nigeria piloting a patient exit survey for health facilities, and we had a section similar to the one above. Watching the enumerator patiently try to explain, repeatedly, the difference between “strongly agree” and “agree” seemed painful for all involved. (Do you just agree? Or do you strongly agree? Yes, for the next statement, too.) So on the second day of piloting, we use a binary scale: Do you agree or disagree? It was much less painful, but what if all the variation in opinions was not between agreeing and disagreeing but rather in shades of agreement? Maybe this intervention takes people from mild enthusiasm for the clinic’s cleanliness to radical enthusiasm. On the other hand, how much of that variation is just noise?
There is a whole literature on this agree-disagree style of survey item, sometimes called a Likert item. When you tally up the responses across the items, that’s a Likert Scale. (That’s pronounced lick-ert, and has been called by Latham (2006) “among the most mispronounced in [his] field.”) The traditional Likert item has 5 choices: Strongly Disagree | Disagree | Neither agree nor disagree | Agree | Strongly Agree. But there are a range of design options.
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