Rating scales are used to measure everything from voting intentions to customer satisfaction. It is no exaggeration to state that rating scales are indispensable to researchers in such disciplines as marketing, management, political science, management information systems, psychology, and sociology, among others. All measuring devices, including rating scales, must be objective if they are to have any value to a researcher. Unfortunately, responses to rating scales can be affected by many different factors. For instance, it would not be appropriate to use rating scales to determine whether homeless people living in Calcutta have a different level of happiness from individuals living in Beverly Hills, or whether smokers desired cigarettes more than heroin addicts desired heroin.
Some rating scales contain numbers.
Negative values from -5 to 0, on the other hand, suggest the presence of the opposite of the attribute, i.e., being a failure. They also found that this effect existed whether the study was conducted by written questionnaire or telephone survey. The purpose of the current study was to determine whether the effect of numbers on rating scales would be present in research using American subjects and with the type of scales more typically used in marketing and business research, e.g., client satisfaction ratings, likelihood of making a change, and overall performance. Method A sample of 139 undergraduate students was obtained at a large New York City college. Each subject was asked to complete a two-page questionnaire consisting of eight questions, and was randomly assigned to one of two versions of the questionnaire.