A NEW MEASUREMENT PROCEDURE FOR ATTITUDINAL RESEARCH - ANALYSIS OF ITS PSYCHOMETRIC AND INFORMATIONAL PROPERTIES

Since measurement errors have strong effects in all relationships (statistical or otherwise) studied, there is an increasing interest in the data quality, which is the major justification for this research. This paper aims to present a new measurement procedure, the letter scale, which avoids many of the problems connected with the response modalities traditionally used in attitudinal research, especially the ordinal categorical scales. This paper analyzes the error composition of the scores obtained with this new measurement procedure. The validity of the procedure is also analyzed and the observed variance is assessed to determine which part of the observed variance is "valid", which part is random error (attenuating relationships) and which is correlated error (magnifying relationships). Structural equation models will be used to provide estimates of the measurement quality: (i) Reliability, (ii) Construct validity, method effect and residual variance. In addition, this letter scale is evaluated under another different perspective, Information Theory measures are also used to assess the amount of information transmitted. The relative merits of this new measurement procedure as opposed to other common response modalities will be discussed in both cases.