Advanced Research Methods Indices, Scales and Typologies By David Warren Kirsch

Indices Welcome to the English Language The Plural of Index  Definitions:  In survey analysis, a number of variables may be combined into a composite measure or index which is expressed as a single score. For example, an investigator may ask several questions about various aspects of human-computer interaction such as: hours spent per day using a computer, preferred brand of hardware, OS of choice, ease of use, etc… and then combine the answers into a single measure of reported interaction. Each respondent can then be assigned a single score on this composite scale.

Indices Continued  An Index can also refer to an indicator of something that is not measured directly. For example, voting for socialist political parties is sometimes used as an index of politically militant attitudes among manual workers. (Abercrombie 120)  The summing or combining of many separate measures of a construct or variable (Neuman 511)

Indices Continued  According to Babbie: “We construct an index by accumulating scores assigned to individual attributes (Babbie 150).”  According to Neuman, indexes are not very difficult to use.

Index Construction  According to Babbie, there are four steps to constructing indices (Babbie 152).  1. Item Selection  2. Examining empirical relationships  3. Scoring the index  4. Validating the Index

Item Selection  Face Validity: Make sure that your tailor your index to the phenomena that you are measuring.  Unidimensionality: You may only measure one dimension of a concept.  General and Specific Dimensions: The “what,” “where,” and “whens.”  Variance: Techniques for the difference among groups.

Examining Empirical Relationships  Is the relationship bivariate (two variable) in nature or multivariate (many variables).

Scoring  After you have chosen the best items for your index, you next assign scores for particular responses to create a composite measure.  How do you know when you have the best items?  “Imagine working for someone who told you to create the best possible product and then was smart enough to know when you did it.” (Kawasaki 30-31)  Just be methodical in the item selection.  Missing Data: You may expunge or analyze as an addendum to your other measurements.

Validation  In this case, validation means the logical tightness of a design in the quality of measurement.  External Validity: Those who score a particular way will score in a similar manner in other measurements. This is necessary to get to the “real deal.”

Scales No. Not the ones fish have.  Definition: A scale is a measure in which a researcher captures the intensity, direction, level, or potency of a variable construct (Neuman 176).  Scales have two purposes: 1. Scales help in the conceptualization and operationalization processes. 2. Scaling produces quantitative measures and can be used with other variables to test hypotheses.

Likert Scale LIKERT SCALES: Rensis Likert provided an ordinal level measurement of a person’s attitude. The score is computed by summing the number of responses a person gives. You must have a minimum of two categories.

Thurston Scale  THURSTONE SCALE: Louis Thurstone, a comparison of attitudes when each person makes a unique judgment. The dispersion of individual judgments around a common response follows the normal distribution. To construct this scale one should have a large number of evaluative statements that should be as exhaustive as possible.

Bogardus Scale  BOGARDUS SOCIAL DISTANCE SCALE: Emory Borgardus created this scale to measure the social distance that separates ethnic or other groups from each other.  People respond to questions that are socially distant on one end and others that are socially intimate on the other.

Guttman Scale  GUTTMAN SCALING: Louis Guttman developed this scale and it differs from the other scale in that the data is evaluated after it is collected. Multiple indicators are used to document an underlying single dimension of a construct.

Semantic Differential  SEMANTIC DIFFERENTIAL SCALING: provides an indirect measure of how a person feels about a concept, object, or other person. This measures subjective feelings by using polar opposite adjectives to create a rating or scale. These are commonly used in product marketing.

Typologies: “There are two types of people and you ain’t one of ‘em.”  Definition: A type of classification with two or more concepts in which the intersection of the concepts creates a set of subtypes or lower level concepts. Often this is the basis of a concept cluster in social theory.  A good example of this is Merton’s Goals and Means, or lack thereof, to create his version of anomie.