Semantic Differential Rating Scale

11 Key excerpts on "Semantic Differential Rating Scale"

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  Psychological Testing

  An Introduction

  • George Domino, Marla L. Domino(Authors)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  In fact, there seems to be agreement that attitudes are multidimensional and that what is needed are more sophisticated techniques than the simple unidimensional approaches of Thurstone and Likert. The Semantic Differential (SemD). The SemD was developed as a way of assessing word mean-ing but because this technique has been used quite frequently in the assessment of attitudes it Attitudes, Values, and Interests 135 My ideal self etc. good small beautiful passive sharp slow dirty bad large ugly active dull fast clean FIGURE 6–2. Example of a Semantic Differential Scale. can legitimately be considered here. The SemD is a method of observing and measuring the psychological meaning of things, usually con-cepts. We can communicate with one another because words and concepts have a shared mean-ing. If I say to you, “I have a dog,” you know what a dog is. Yet that very word also has addi-tional meanings that vary from person to per-son. One individual may think of dog as warm, cuddly, and friendly while another person may think of dog as smelly, fierce, and troublesome. There are thus at least two levels of meaning to words: the denotative or dictionary mean-ing, and the connotative or personal meaning. Osgood (Osgood, Suci, & Tannenbaum, 1957) developed the SemD to measure the connota-tive meanings of concepts as points in a seman-tic space. That space is three-dimensional, like a room in a house, and the dimensions, identified through factor analysis, are evaluative (e.g., good-bad), potency (e.g., strong-weak), and activity (fast-slow). Four additional factorial dimensions have been identified: density (e.g., numerous-sparse), orderliness (e.g., haphazard-systematic), reality (e.g., authentic-fake), and familiarity (e.g., commonplace-exceptional) (Bentler & LaVoie, 1972; LaVoie & Bentler, 1974). The SemD then consists of a series of bipolar adjectives separated by a 7-point scale, on which the respondent rates a given concept.

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  An Introduction to Psychological Assessment and Psychometrics

  • Keith Coaley(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  Their semantic differential was designed to provide a measurement based upon the meanings people attribute to terms or concepts connected with attitudes. This uses a questionnaire which lists bipolar adjectives such as good–bad, valuable–worthless, enjoyable–unenjoyable, or friendly–unfriendly. Each bipolar pair is linked to a dimension or scale having seven points, with the two ends represented by the contrasting adjectives and the mid-point being a neutral position, like this:

  Figure 2.3 Scales illustrating the semantic differential approach

  Osgood et al. devised scales like these in order to study the connotative (personal) meanings that concepts such as ‘sickness,’ ‘sin,’ ‘hatred’ and ‘love’ generate among people. These concepts could then be extended to others which generate attitudes, for example ‘sport,’ ‘politics,’ ‘television’ and so on. Obviously, the choice of bipolar adjectives will depend on the concept being investigated. Many of these will be evaluative and principally indicate a person’s feelings about it. The number of points across the scales can also be varied.

  Respondents asked to complete the measure will simply be asked to make a mark on the scale points which indicate their attitude. It has been found that even young children, who would have difficulty with Thurstone or Likert scales, are able to respond to the semantic differential (Gahagan, 1987). A person’s overall attitude score is represented by the sum, or possibly the mean, of the scores marked on all the dimensions. The responses to each concept may also be scored on the semantic dimensions (evaluative, potency and activity), and by comparing these for one construct or more, we will gain an understanding of what is called the person’s ‘semantic space’.

  However, responses which fall at the centre of the scale may be difficult to interpret as these will possibly represent either indifference or ignorance, and further investigation may then be needed to establish the person’s view. In some instances it may also be possible that the individual responds by marking the extreme ends of the scale throughout the measure, regardless of any attitude adopted. This might not become clear unless a number of measures are administered.

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  Essentials of Marketing Research

  • Barry Babin(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  A pre-test may be conducted using these items allowing for an item analysis to be performed. The item analysis helps select items that evoke a wide response (meaning all respondents are not selecting the same response point such as all strongly agree), allowing the item to discriminate among those with positive and negative attitudes. Items are also analyzed for clarity or unusual response patterns. Thus, the final Likert items should be clearly understood and elicit an accurate range of responses corresponding to respondents’ true attitudes. Semantic Differential A semantic differential is a scale type on which respondents describe their attitude using a series of bipolar rating scales. Bipolar rating scales involve respondents choosing between opposing adjec-tives—such as “good” and “bad,” “modern” and “old-fashioned,” or “clean” and “dirty.” One adjec-tive anchors the beginning and the other the end (or poles) of the scale.The subject makes repeated judgments about the concept under investigation on each of the scale. Exhibit 10.8 shows an example semantic differential approach for assessing consumer attitudes toward a branded video displayed on Instagram. The scoring of the semantic differential can be illustrated using the scale bounded by the anchors “complex” and “simple.” Respondents are instructed to check the place that indicates the nearest appropriate adjective. From left to right, the scale intervals represent the belief that the stimulus is somewhere between extremely complex. One advantage provided by using scale labels over each category is the ability to influence the distribution of responses. How complex is streaming video with Apple TV? semantic differential A measure of attitudes that consists of a series of bipolar rating scales with opposite terms on either end.

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  A Survey of Psycholinguistics

  • Susan H. Houston(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  To increase the sensitivity of our instrument, we may insert a scale between each pair of terms, so that the subject can indicate both the direction and the intensity of each judgment (pp. 14-20). Thus the semantic differential consists essentially of a set of bipolar adjectival scales, to be applied to a given concept. Verbal fluency is not at issue, since the subject is required only to indi-cate, for each pairing of a concept with a scale, the direction of the association and its intensity on this scale. After experimenta-tion, a seven-step scale was adopted as standard. Osgood notes that 1 2 4 THE SEMANTIC DIFFERENTIAL, EVALUATION AND APPLICATIONS the crux of the method, of course, lies in selecting the sample of de-scriptive polar terms. Ideally, the sample should be as representative as possible of all the ways in which meaningful judgments can vary, and yet be small enough in size to be efficient in practice. This sample must in other words be culled from the great number of pairs of polarly-opposed adjectives in the language, but must still contain enough terms so that the subject's responses can be considered a good approximation of his total meaning response to the given term. The concept of the SD did not arise solely from extrapolation from more common ways to elicit meaning responses. It was in part suggested by Osgood's research, in conjunction with Kar-woski and Odbert of Dartmouth (cf. Odbert, Karwoski and Eckerson, 1942), on the phenomenon known as synesthesia. Synesthesia, or transfer across sensory modalities such that a stimulus in one modality elicits a response in another, had pre-viously been studied mainly in its pathological aspects (e.g., Blum, 1961, Chapter 14); but these researchers found that synesthesia, especially in regard to color responses to music, is apparently a common occurrence.

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  Business Research Methods and Statistics Using SPSS

  • Robert P Burns, Richard Burns(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  good-bad, successful-unsuccessful, beautiful-ugly, cruel-kind, clean-dirty, wise-foolish, honest-dishonest, happy-sad, nice-awful . The same set of scales can be used to rate a variety of different objects (persons, items, events, etc, so that it is possible to make direct comparisons among a person’s attitudes towards smoking, towards politicians, particular products or towards any other set of items whose attitude ratings the researcher is interested in comparing. Different concepts may require slightly different sets of scales for maximum rating precision; ‘kind-cruel’, for example, would probably not work as well as ‘beautiful-ugly’ in measuring attitudes toward modern painting, while we would tend not to use ‘beautiful-ugly’ when rating a political leader although ‘kind-cruel’ might well be a relevant dimension to include. Azjen and Fishbein (1980) use the semantic differential as a means of measuring different parts of an attitude in their theory of reasoned action about consumer behaviour.

  The reliability and validity of the semantic differential is well documented. A typical layout and instructions for the semantic differential techniques is as follows. Semantic differential scale

  ‘The purpose of this study is to measure the meanings which certain concepts have for you. This is done by having you judge them against a set of descriptive scales which consist of adjectives and their opposites. You are asked to make your judgements on the basis of what these things mean to you. On each page of this booklet, you will find a different concept to be judged and beneath it a set of scales. You are asked to rate the concept on each of the scales in order

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  Research Methods For Business

  A Skill Building Approach

  • Uma Sekaran, Roger Bougie(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  The bipolar adjectives used might employ such terms as Good–Bad; Strong–Weak; Hot–Cold. The semantic differential scale is used to assess respondents’ attitudes toward a particular brand, advertisement, object, or individual. The responses can be plotted to obtain a good idea of their perceptions. A semantic dif- ferential scale is ordinal in nature. However, it is often treated as an interval scale. An example of the semantic differential scale follows. Numerical scale The numerical scale is similar to the semantic differential scale, with the difference that numbers on a five-point or seven-point scale are provided, with bipolar adjectives at both ends, as illustrated below. This scale is also often treated as an interval scale, although it is formally ordinal in nature. EXAMPLE Responsive — — — — — — Unresponsive Beautiful — — — — — — Ugly Courageous — — — — — — Timid chapter  measurement: scaling, reliability and validity 215 Itemized rating scale A five-point or seven-point scale with anchors, as needed, is provided for each item and the respondent states the appropriate number on the side of each item, or circles the relevant number against each item, as per the exam- ples that follow. The responses to the items are then summed. This uses an interval scale. EXAMPLE Respond to each item using the scale below, and indicate your response number on the line by each item. 1 Very Unlikely 2 Unlikely 3 Neither Unlikely Nor Likely 4 Likely 5 Very Likely 1 I will be changing my job within the next 12 months. — 2 I will take on new assignments in the near future. — 3 It is possible that I will be out of this organization within the next 12 months. — Note that the above is a balanced rating scale with a neutral point. Not at All Interested 1 Somewhat Interested 2 Moderately Interested 3 Very Much Interested 4 How would you rate your interest in changing current organizational policies? 1 2 3 4 This is an unbalanced rating scale which does not have a neutral point.

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  RESEARCH METHODS FOR BEHAVIORAL SCIENCE

  • Charles Stangor, , , (Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  The respondent expresses his or her feelings toward the topic by marking one point on the dimension. To quantify the scale, a number is assigned to each possible response, for instance, from 23 (most negative) to 13 (most positive). Each respondent’s score is computed by averaging across his or her responses to each of the items after the items in which the negative response has the higher number have been reverse-scored. Although seman-tic differentials can sometimes be used to assess other dimensions, they are most often restricted to measuring people’s evaluations about a topic—that is, whether they feel positively or negatively about it. TABLE 4.3 A Semantic Differential Scale Assessing Attitudes Toward a University My university is: Beautiful _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ Ugly Bad _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ Good Pleasant _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ Unpleasant Dirty _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ Clean Smart _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ Stupid Respondents are told to check the middle category if neither adjective describes the object better than the other and to check along the scale in either direction if they feel the object is described better by either of the two adjectives. These ratings are usually scored from 23 to 13 (with appropriate reversals). Scores are averaged or summed to provide a single score for each individual. © Cengage Learning Copyright 2014 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.

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  Attitudes and Related Psychosocial Constructs

  Theories, Assessment, and Research

  • Lewis Aiken(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications, Inc

    (Publisher)

  The technique focuses on the evaluative aspect of attitudes, but it may be used to measure attitudes toward multidi-mensional as well as unidimensional concepts. The data consist of ratings given by respondents to a series of concepts on each of several 7-point scales. The concepts may refer to people, institu-tions, sociopolitical issues, or other kinds of attitudinal targets. The 7-point scales may include such bipolar adjectives as bad-good, weak-strong, and slow-fast, although the evaluative dimension (bad vs. good) is most common on semantic differential attitude scales. For example, a respondent whose at-titude toward the concept of politics is that it is fairly bad and fairly strong, but neutral in terms of its fastness or slowness might rate it as follows: Politics Bad ^ Good Weak ** Strong Slow V 0 Fast Responses on the bipolar adjectival scales can be added to obtain an over-all attitude score. Alternatively, and more complexly, each of several con-cepts toward which attitudes are to be assessed may be scored on several se-mantic dimensions, such as evaluation, potency, and activity, and compared with the respondent's ratings on other concepts. A graphical plot of the re-spondent's scores on each semantic dimension yields a semantic space; con- Assessment Methods and Instruments 39 cepts that are close to each other in the semantic space have similar connota-tive meanings for the respondent. Q-Sort In the Q-sort technique for assessing attitudes (Stephenson, 1953), re-spondents sort a large number of cards into 9 (or 11) piles. Each card con-tains a statement expressing an attitude—ranging from highly negative to highly positive—toward a specified object or event. The sorting procedure is similar to the first stage of the equal-appearing intervals method, but the re-spondent is directed to sort the statements in such a way that the number of cards placed in all piles approximates a normal frequency distribution.

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  Experimental Methods in Psychology

  • Gustav Levine, Stanley Parkinson(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  But adjectives suggesting moods (happy, depressed, angry, etc.), can also be used, as in the earlier example that had end points of very unhappy and very happy. Zanna and Cooper (1974) asked subjects to indicate how they felt, “right now,” on a 31-point scale ranging from calm to tense. More often than not, adjectives are employed in a more subtle measurement of attitudes, called the semantic differential (Osgood, Suci, & Tannenbaum, 1957). This approach is an indirect one, as is apparent from the form of the questions. The semantic differential is particularly useful in providing a variety of scale items testing the same attitude. OSGOOD'S SEMANTIC DIFFERENTIAL The full appreciation of the range of scale labels that could be used to express an attitude stems from the introduction of Osgood's semantic differential (Osgood et al., 1957). Charles Osgood and his associates developed this measurement technique while working on a theory of meaning. Their scale consists of the presentation of some concept, say labor unions, or politicians, or the United Nations, followed by a series of scale items, perhaps a half dozen or as many as 20, each bound by bipolar adjectives, and each used to evaluate the same concept. It might look like the scale presented in Fig. 14.1 (although perhaps with more items). In the example in Fig. 14.1 all of the adjectives used to define the poles of the scale items have an underlying dimension in common: an implication of ranging from bad to good. Osgood spoke of adjectives sharing the bad to good implication as representing the evaluative dimension. Each pair of adjectives has other implications besides the bad-good dimension, so the evaluation component is not as clear as in direct rating scales. However, because all of the items share the evaluative dimension, collectively they can offer an attitudinal bottom line

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  Statistical Methods for Validation of Assessment Scale Data in Counseling and Related Fields

  • Dimiter M. Dimitrov(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • American Counseling Association

    (Publisher)

  active–passive. These three dimensions of affective meaning were found to be cross-cultural universals in a study of dozens of cultures (Osgood, May, & Miron, 1975).

  An example of a semantic differential item is shown in Figure 1.2 . Usually the position marked 0 is labeled neutral, the 1 positions are labeled slightly, the 2 positions quite, and the 3 positions extremely (e.g., Heise, 1970).

  Figure 1.2

  An Example of a Semantic Differential Item

  The semantic differential scale measures both the directionality (e.g., tense vs. relaxed) and intensity (e.g., slight through extreme) of the person's reaction to the respective stimulus. A readable discussion of methodology and scaling related to semantic differential was provided by Heise (1970). As he noted (p. 235), ratings on bipolar adjective scales tend to be correlated, and three basic dimensions of response account for most of the covariation in ratings: Evaluation, Potency, and Activity (EPA). Thus, unlike the unidimensional Likert scales, the semantic differential scale has a three-dimensional (EPA) structure. Prior to combining the item scores into separate factor scores, numerical values (–3, –2, –1, 0, 1, 2, 3) are assigned to the scale positions (see Figure 1.2 ), going from one end of the scale to the other. Then the EPA factor scores (e, p, and a, respectively) can be used separately or to produce a general polarization index, , which indicates the distance from the origin (zero) of the scale and the particular concept under consideration. When the interest is in comparing two concepts (or two groups on the same concept), collectively on all three EPA dimensions, one can use the so-called D score: , where e1 , p1 , and a1 are the factor scores on Evaluation, Potency, and Activity, respectively, for the first concept (or group), and e2 , p2 , and a2

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  Experimental Design

  From User Studies to Psychophysics

  • Douglas W. Cunningham, Christian Wallraven(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • A K Peters/CRC Press

    (Publisher)

  Quite often, a fourth dimension— predictability —plays a significant role. In one of the largest cross-cultural applications of semantic differentials, Osgood (1964) gathered 100 basic concepts from everyday life and translated them into 14 different lan-guages (English, Finnish, Japanese, Kannada, Dutch, Flemish, French, Ara-bic, Swedish, Cantonese, Farsi, Serbo-Croatian, Hindi, and Pashto). The 100 concepts were broken down into ten subsets. Each subset was rated by 20 different people for each language (all native speakers, all male between 12 and 16 years old) along 50 bipolar scales. With 20 participants, 10 subsets, and 15 countries (Farsi data were collected for two separate countries) this amounts to over 3,000 participants! The results were subjected to PCA anal-ysis. The first—and most dominant—factor in every language was the eval-uation dimension. The second factor was either the potency or activity di-mension, and the third factor was the remaining dimension. This structure has been verified repeatedly since then for nearly every possible type of con-cept, despite large variations in both experimental methodology and statistical analysis. 5.3.4.3 Scale Selection In selecting the scales to be used, care must be taken to ensure that they sample semantic space representatively. This is very difficult and costly, as it requires large numbers of trials, participants, and stimuli. Many different scales must be tried to see how well they vary with the concepts one is interested in cap-turing. Obviously, in order to be able to measure the semantic space with as few scales as possible, it is best to use only pure scales—scales that correlated uniquely and very highly with their appropriate dimension. Using weakly cor-related scales dilutes and confounds the results (Koltuv, 1962; Mitsos, 1961). Determining which scales are truly pure can only be done empirically.

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