Effect of the Number of Response Categories on the Reliability and Validity of Rating Scales
By Luis M. Lozano, E. García-Cueto, José Muñiz. 2008
807 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The Likert-type format is one of the most widely used in all types of scales in the field of social sciences. Nevertheless, there is no definitive agreement on the number of response categories that optimizes the psychometric properties of the scales. The aim of the present work is to determine in a systematic fashion the number of response alternatives that maximizes the fundamental psychometric properties of a scale: reliability and validity. The study is carried out with data simulated using the Monte Carlo method. We simulate responses to 30 items with correlations between them ranging from 0.2 to 0.9. We also manipulate sample size, analyzing four different sizes: 50, 100, 200, and 500 cases. The number of response options employed ranges from two to nine. The results show that as the number of response alternatives increases, both reliability and validity improve. The optimum number of alternatives is between four and seven. With fewer than four alternatives the reliability and validity decrease, an...
Subfields: Management Science and Operations Research
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/99aaaaef914e8ae9497a055b7672397bea748440
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In Management Science and Operations Research
Citations in the corpus
- Refining the linkage between perceived capability and entrepreneurial intention: roles of perceived opportunity, fear of failure, and gender (2016, background): “Too few response categories may loosely capture a respondent’s attitude and produce more conservative statistical results (Lozano et al. 2008).”
- Delphi methodology in health research: how to do it?☆ (2015, background): “Test-retest reliability has been reported to decrease for scales with more than 10 categories [23] and it has been suggested that the optimal number of categories lie between four to seven [24].”
- In Search of the Optimal Number of Response Categories in a Rating Scale (2014, background): “Previous studies showed that the most substantial change of reliability and validity occurs when the number of categories changes to 3 points from either 2 or 4 points (e.g., Lozano et al., 2008).”