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Scales
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Categorical Scale Quoted from Frary retrieved from WWW, 4/1/2005
Category Proliferation.
A typical question is the following:
Marital Status:
Unless the research in question were deeply concerned with conjugal relationships, it is inconceivable that the distinctions among all of these categories could be useful. Moreover, for many samples, the number of responders in the latter categories would be too small to permit generalization. Usually, such a question reflects the need to distinguish between a conventional familial setting and anything else. If so, the question could be:
Marital status: 1) Married and living with spouse 2) Other In addition to brevity, this has the advantage of not appearing to pry so strongly into personal matters.
Order of Categories.
When response categories represent a progression between a lower level of response and a higher one, it is usually better to list them from the lower level to the higher in left-to-right order, for example,
1) Never 2) Seldom 3) Occasionally 4) Frequently
This advice is based only on anecdotal evidence, but it seems plausible that associating greater response levels with lower numerals might be confusing for some responders.
Combining Categories.
In contrast to the options listed just above, consider the following:
1) Seldom or never 2) Occasionally 3) Frequently
Combining "seldom" with "never" might be desirable if responders would be very unlikely to mark "never" and if "seldom" would connote an almost equivalent level of activity, for example, in response to the question, "How often do you tell you wife that you love her?" In contrast, suppose the question was, "How often do you drink alcoholic beverages?" Then the investigator might indeed wish to distinguish those who never drink. When a variety of questions use the same response scale, it is usually undesirable to combine categories.
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