Summated Rating Scale Construction: An Introduction (Quantitative Applications in the Social Sciences)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0803943415 ISBN 13: 9780803943414

Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc, 1991

The goal for any social scientist conducting a survey is to develop a rating on some attitude, value or opinion - a summated rating scale. Aimed at helping researchers construct more effective scales, Spector shows how to determine the number of items necessary, the appropriate amount of response categories and the most productive wording of items. The author discusses how to sort good items from bad (including item-remainder coefficients and Cronbach′s alpha) and how to validate a scale, including dimensional validity from factor analysis. User-friendly, the book concludes with a step-by-step account of how to develop a summated rating scale based on classical test theory.

About the Author:

Paul E. Spector is a distinguished professor of industrial/organizational (I/O) psychology and I/O doctoral program director at the University of South Florida. He is also director of the NIOSH funded Sunshine Education and Research Center′s Occupational Health Psychology doctoral program. He is the Associate Editor for Point/Counterpoint for Journal of Organizational Behavior, Associate Editor for Work & Stress, and is on the editorial boards of Journal of Applied Psychology and Human Resources Management Review.

He has research interests in both content and research methodology. His content research concerns occupational health and safety, including injuries, stress and workplace violence. His methodology interests involve the connections among measurement, statistics, and inference. He has published four books with SAGE: Job Satisfaction: Applications, Assessment, Causes and Consequences, Research Designs, SAS 8 Programming for Researchers and Social Scientists, and Summated Rating Scale Construction.

Review:

"The steps of scale development are clearly explained, with brief rationales of the methods involved...Having read the book, almost anyone with a basic social science education could go through the practical motions of developing a scale...says in general terms that theory is important and goes on to provide hints on how to generate a pool of items. The hints are empirically sound and useful.." Author: Joint Centre for Survey Methods Newsletter