An Overview of Alternative Formats to the Likert Format: A Comment on Wilson et al. (2022).
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Wilson et al. (2022) compared the Likert response format to an alternative format, which they called the Guttman response format. Using a Rasch modelling approach, they found that the Guttman response format had better properties relative to the Likert response format. We agree with their analyses and conclusions. However, they have failed to mention many existing articles that have sought to overcome the disadvantages of the Likert format through the use of an alternative format. For example, the so-called ``Guttman response format'' is essentially the same as the Expanded format, which was proposed by Zhang and Savalei (2016) as a way to overcome the disadvantages of the Likert format. Similar alternative formats have been investigated since the 1960s. {In this short response article, we provide a review of several alternative formats, explaining in detail the key characteristics of all the alternative formats that are designed to overcome the problems of the Likert format.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.026 | 0.109 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.016 | 0.020 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.013 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".