In this video we'll take a look at how to deal with reverse scored items on a
Likert scale. And these are also known as negative items. For our example here
we're looking at an example where we're assessing perfectionism, and we're using
the Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale and you can see the reference here
for those of you who may be interested in looking this up and pulling the
article. Now what I did in this example was I just selected a few of the
questions from the Self-Oriented Perfectionism subscale of this scale
here. So we've got four questions here, and these are also called items, so I'll
be referring to these items often as well. So we have question 1 or item 1,
question 2 or item 2, and so on. And a person reads each question or item, such
as the first one,
"One of my goals is to be perfect and everything I do." And if you think of
someone here who is highly perfectionistic, or we think of them as
a perfectionist,
what is it that they would answer to this question? Well, notice the scale ranges
from strongly disagree to strongly agree, and we have numbers here to correspond
to that continuum. And, just as a quick side note, a 4 would be a neutral
response, or it might read neither agree nor disagree, but the way the scale was
constructed, we just have the anchors labeled, which you'll see for many scales.
So if someone's highly perfectionistic and they read this question, "One of my
goals is to be perfect in everything I do," they should answer with either a 6
or 7, right?
Probably a 7, but a 6 is possible as well. But whatever their answer may be, it
definitely should be on that high end of this continuum. They should indicate to
some degree that they do strongly agree with the statement.
Our next question, let's go ahead and read that, "I strive to be as perfect as I can
be."
Once again, if we're thinking of a perfectionist, they should answer with
a 6 or 7 again. Now the next question is what I want to focus on here
for a minute, really these last two questions. For question number three, "I
never aim for perfection on my work." Now if we think about someone there who is a
perfectionist, and they read this question "I never aim for perfection on
my work,"
what should they do there, you want to ask yourself? Well they most likely would
strongly disagree, right? With a 1, answer with a 1, or maybe answer with a
2. And then as we read this last question, "I seldom feel the need to be
perfect,"
well a perfectionist definitely doesn't feel that way. They feel the need to be
perfect usually all the time, so they're going to answer, again, on the strongly
disagree end, so with a 1 or 2.
These last two questions or items, where someone who is high on the trait or we
call it a construct being measured here,
perfectionism, someone who is high on that variable, where they answer low on
the scale, those are known as negative or reverse scored items. So these are special,
because we have to do something with these prior to creating a total score.
And what we'll often do here is, we'll add up these, the scores on these items here,
to create a total score. So, for example, if someone answered all 4s, then they
would get, if the scale consisted of just four questions, they would get a 16, 4
+ 4 + 4 + 4, and so on.
Now in another video I do go through how to add up items on a number of different
questions, or put another way, how to add up a number of different variables, so
you may want to take a look at that, if you'd like more information on how to do
that. But in this video, we're going to deal with just how do I handle these
reverse coded items,
how do I use SPSS to actually change the responses on a scale? So let's go ahead and look
at that.
So once again a perfectionist answers with 7s on one and two and 1s on 3
& 4, or somewhere close to that. And the problem that happens here is that the
instructions from the authors or the creators of the scale, as it's usually
the case, is that high scores on the scale, since it's called perfectionism,
high scores indicate someone who is highly perfectionistic. But if we look
at this here, if we take the person's responses,
let's say we have someone to respond in the most extreme way, so they got 7s
on questions one and two, and they got 1s on questions three and four.
Well then their score would be, if we just literally added these up, it would
be 7 + 7 + 1 + 1, which will give us 16. Now if you think about that,
that is not a high score, because the highest possible score according to the
scale is 28, or seven times four items. So something's wrong here. We need to work
with this scale, we need to do something in order to get it so that someone who
is high on perfectionism, doesn't score 16, but instead they score something like a
28. So what we need to do in SPSS is we need to do is called reverse coding
these items here.