Verbal rating scale
In the empirical social sciences, a verbal rating scale ( VRS ) is an ideally equidistantly scaled descriptive rating scale whose labels (“brands”) are represented by words or groups of terms. The scaling words or groups of terms describe sections of a scale that can be understood as an interval scale.
- The labels "Vanilla ice cream - raspberry ice cream - chocolate ice cream - forest master ice cream - peppermint ice cream" are therefore not a suitable scale mark for a verbal rating scale, because the terms vanilla ice cream, raspberry ice cream etc. are only nominally scaled.
- The inscriptions “very much like - pretty much - neither particularly happy nor particularly reluctant - fairly reluctant - very reluctant”, on the other hand, would be suitable as scale marks for the test question, how would someone like e.g. B. would travel to the German Baltic Sea on their next vacation.
Verbal rating scales in human medicine
An example of a VRS in medicine is the pain scale, whereby a rating of a subjective pain sensation is expressed by words either by the patient himself or by a trained observer.
Quantification of adjectives and rating scales
The evaluation of questionnaires from different scientific disciplines often requires the quantification of the results, for example by converting them into percentages. It is of crucial importance that the expressions used are "correctly" understood by the test persons. This also applies to the opposite case: Anyone who uses verbalized evaluations of their results in a scientific paper (“mostly cheerful”, “slightly more often”, “largely traditional” etc.) should only use adjectives that are shared by the readers in the same way be understood.
The endpoints of the scales (“never ↔ always”, “not at all ↔ completely” etc.) are clear and unproblematic. As various studies have shown, there are also relatively uniform subjective assessments within the scales for some expressions, while others are assessed quite differently. Even as "free-standing" adjectives - that is, without any connection with a scale - some words are intuitively located roughly the same by the members of a language community . This depends, among other things, on language use and language culture , which, however, change over time ( language change ) . The social psychologist Bernd Rohrmann found clear differences in understanding between the years 1966 and 1976. Rohrmann and other researchers have determined which words are best suited to quantify the results of data collection from verbalized scales.
The following are examples of three differently used scales with correspondingly suitable terms - one five-point and one eleven-point. However, it is fundamentally true that scales containing more than seven levels are generally unsuitable.
| 0% | 10% | 20% | 30% | 40% | 50% | 60% | 70% | 80% | 90% | 100% |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Frequencies | ||||||||||
| never | Rare | occasionally | often | always | ||||||
| never | barely | Rare | low | moderate | medium | clear | mostly | often | Mostly | always |
| I ntenities | ||||||||||
| without | weak | mediocre | strong | full | ||||||
| without | very weak | weak | relatively weak | to some extent | mediocre | mostly | relatively strong | strong | very strong | full |
| Probabilities | ||||||||||
| impossible | rather unlikely | maybe | more likely | for sure | ||||||
| impossible | hardly true. | untrue. | rather untrue. | perhaps | maybe | possible | more likely | probably | most likely | for sure |
See also
Individual evidence
- ^ J. Bortz, N. Döring: Research methods and evaluation for human and social scientists . Springer, Heidelberg 2006, ISBN 3-540-33305-3 , p. 177.
- ↑ a b Bernd Rohrmann: Empirical studies on the development of answer scales for social science research. In: Journal of Social Psychology. 1978, 9, pp. 222-245.
- ↑ Norbert Schwarz, B. Scheuring: Self-reported behavior and symptom frequencies: What respondents learn from the answers given in the questionnaire. In: Journal of Clinical Psychology. 1992, Volume 21, pp. 197-208.
- ^ Ariane-Sissy Wagner: The model of modern organizational development: theory-guided structural equation modeling of selected model components. Springer-Verlag, Wiesbaden 2014, ISBN 978-3-658-02125-2 .
- ^ Karl Heinz Renner, Timo Heydasch, Gerhard Ströhlein: Research methods of psychology: From the question to the presentation. Springer-Verlag, Wiesbaden 2012, ISBN 978-3-531-16729-9 , pp. 61-66.
- ↑ Elisabeth Raab-Steiner, Michael Benesch (ed.): The questionnaire - From the research idea to the SPSS / PASW evaluation. 3rd updated and revised edition. UTB / Facultas, Vienna 2012, ISBN 978-3-8252-8496-1 .