Guttman scale

The Guttman scale ( named after the social researcher Louis Guttman ) is a scaling method in empirical social research, are recorded with the settings a thing (eg, persons, groups, behaviors ).

In the Guttman scale the respondents are presented some statements that are to affirm or deny it. These are arranged so that the " most normal " statement at the beginning there is an extreme at the end. Who affirms a statement, this normally does well in all previous statements. A Guttman scale at which this always occurs, it is called perfect. Such generate a scale is often difficult and only a few statements that need to be evaluated, possible.

Example

A variant of the Guttman scale is the scale of social distance, which was introduced in 1925 by Emory S. Bogardus. It measures the distance of the respondent towards a particular group, such as a social minority. These will be asked for the willingness a close relation to a group

Who can answer question 3 is yes, should also affirm Questions 1 and 2.

Reproduction coefficient

In this case, a so-called reproduction coefficient from the ratio between reasonable answers forwards ( ie build the successive approvals and are not interrupted in their " logic chain " ) and the total number of answers here. Inappropriate responses would thus be those that break this chain:

This is a measure of how well ( the measuring instrument in this case) maps the set of questions the reality, the empirical relative, on homomorphic way into a numeric relative ( numerical scale of agreement / disagreement ) and a measure of how well the interrogative sentence, the latent variable measures consent.

The reproduction coefficient should have at least the value of .90.