Scale Imposition as Quantitative Alchemy: Studies on the Transitivity of Neuroticism Ratings

It is common practice in psychology to devise "measurement" procedures by imposing rating scales (e.g., Likert items) onto phenomena and treating the values they produce as quantities. The validity of these procedures goes untested. Validity checks are instead performed on sets of these me...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inBasic and applied social psychology Vol. 39; no. 1; pp. 1 - 18
Main Authors Morris, Stefanie Dorough, Grice, James W., Cox, Ryan A.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Mahwah Routledge 02.01.2017
Psychology Press
Subjects
Imposition
Measurement
Neuroses
Neuroticism
Psychology
Quantitative psychology
Social psychology
Transitivity
Validity
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Summary:It is common practice in psychology to devise "measurement" procedures by imposing rating scales (e.g., Likert items) onto phenomena and treating the values they produce as quantities. The validity of these procedures goes untested. Validity checks are instead performed on sets of these measurement procedures (i.e., multi-item scales). We present results from three studies suggesting that people cannot be assumed to preserve transitivity when comparing themselves and others on NEO Neuroticism-domain trait items. As transitivity is one of the fundamental axioms of quantitative measurement, these studies challenge the validity of Neuroticism scales at the level of individual scale items.
ISSN:0197-3533
1532-4834
DOI:10.1080/01973533.2016.1256288