Talk:Guttman scale

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it seems that the sample guttman scale is of little use, as the first 4 categories are all such that each is implied by the subsequent (i.e. allowing immigrants next door automatically implies you'd allow them in your neighborhood [unless you're in a weird border case where nextdoor isn't in your neighborhood]).

That's the whole point of a Guttman scale, and that is the required structure of the data. Holon 07:15, 29 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

What a horrible mess!!!

This article now begins like this:

A hypothetical, perfect Guttman scale consists of a unidimensional set of items that are ranked in order of difficulty from least extreme to most extreme position. For example, a person scoring a "7" on a ten item Guttman scale, will agree with items 1-7 and disagree with items 8,9,10. An important property of Guttman's model is that a person's entire set of responses to all items can be predicted from their cumulative score because the model is deterministic.

What in hell does that mean? "difficulty" seems to mean there "items" are some sort of tasks that someone is to do. That's just a guess. A guess! Why should the reader have to guess? Then "a person scoring a "7" on a ten item Guttman scale".... So a Guttman scale is something on which someone scores points. Why can't the article just say so instead of leaving us to surmise this. Is this about sports? Tennis, maybe? Or chess? Then: "An important property of Guttman's model is that a person's entire set of responses to all items can be predicted from their cumulative score because the model is deterministic." Really? So someone named "Guttman" has a "model". I still don't know if this is about tennis or weighlifting or academic performance on physics examinations or what.

What a mess. Michael Hardy (talk) 17:15, 22 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Actually I disagree with your view. While the article is not 100% in readability or especially good at explaining in layman's terms all the aspects of a Guttman scale, it does give the reader with some minimal statistical insight a very good understanding of a Guttman scale. It even manages the explain more advanced concepts such as coefficients and their relation to the test performed.

For the record, a Guttman scale can be applied to tennis, weightlifting, academic performance and so on (although you might have to create some weird statistics to require it). It's not a scale for ranking specific performances but rather "sets of items in order of difficulty" (as the article says). I suggest going back and reading the introduction again before reading the article...

--Andreala (talk) 10:27, 22 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

To be honest I personaly much more prefer the original version. Michael Hardy, you are being overly critical and simplistic in approaching this subject. The Gutman scale is similar to a likert scale in that it is a generic way of constructing a survey question - a survey being potentially about any desired topic. Let me illustrate further; "An important property of Guttman's model is that a person's entire set of responses to all items can be predicted from their cumulative score because the model is deterministic." This meaning that if somebody ticked answer box 7 out of 10 answer boxes that means that they also agree with answers 1 to 6. However the former explanation is much more less ambigious.

Maybe it does use some slightly complicated epressions, yet I find the definition is perfect in terms of being concise, down to the point and thanks to the choice of vocabulary conveys much more information, less ambiguiously. You can not simplify certain topics and not increase ambiguity, consider the need for mathematical formulas to explain a standard deviation for a sample and a population, for example. --Martindavidsigi 06:22, 9 June 2011 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Martindavidsigi (talk • contribs)

But note that the article was changed between the time of the complaint and the response. --Lambiam 23:09, 26 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

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What kind of model is a Guttman scale in comparison to an unfolding model?

I understand what an unfolding model is. How would you call a Guttman scale? I thought that Coombs made a distinction between dominance models and proximity models. An unfolding model would then be equivalent to a proximity model and the Guttman scale would then be a special case of a dominance model. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.83.33.64 (talk) 11:31, 11 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

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