Assessing Three Sources of Misresponse to Reversed Likert Items

By Scott D. Swain, Danny Weathers, Ronald W. Niedrich. 2008

374 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Applied Psychology, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7eb1abc77675772289be16af5e99cc600bdd519d

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In Applied Psychology

In Safety Research

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Corporate social responsibility in cruising: Using materiality analysis to create shared value (2016, background): “Questions were expressed as affirmations, to minimise misresponses due to the use of negations (Swain et al., 2008).”
Misresponse to Reversed and Negated Items in Surveys: A Review (2012, methodology): “Item verification difficulty theory implies that negations are problematic at the judgment stage because they require additional mental steps during item processing, which increases the likelihood of making mistakes (Swain, Weathers, and Niedrich 2008).”
Moral identity centrality and cause-related marketing : the moderating effects of brand social responsibility image and emotional brand attachment (2016, result): “This is not surprising, as research (Swain et al., 2008) has shown that multi-item scales that contain reversed items often exhibit problems.”
The effect of rating scale format on response styles: the number of response categories and response catgory labels (2010, methodology): “Because reversed items are generally more difficult to answer (Steenkamp & Burgess, 2002; Swain et al., 2008), this extra amount of cognitive difficulty at the response phase will increase the level of MR.”
Measure Twice, Cut down Error: A Process for Enhancing the Validity of Survey Scales (2011, background): “(Benson & Hocevar, 1985; Cacioppo & Berntson, 1994; Swain et al., 2008) Use at least 5–7 response anchors For most respondent populations, 5-point response anchors for unipolar items (that range from a conceptual 0 point to infinity) and 7-point response anchors for bipolar items (that conceptually…”
The proximity effect: The role of inter-item distance on reverse-item bias (2009, background): “In particular, Swain et al. (2008) demonstrate that negated items lead to item verification difficulty.”
What Shall We Do About Grit? A Critical Review of What We Know and What We Don’t Know (2018, neutral): “Negatively worded items are psychometrically problematic because they are known to be more difficult to answer (Swain, Weathers, & Niedrich, 2008), especially for individuals with lower levels of reading ability (e.g., Marsh, 1986), and also because they can lower the reliability and validity of…”