Response Scales

In Explaining Atheism a number of the response options on the surveys have been standardised. For example, where different surveys relied on agreement response scales these agreement scales are now the same.

To make things easier for scoring I created some standard coding functions for each of these scales , for both normal and reverse scored items, which can be applied to the relavent columns.

There is also a scoring function for scoring larger amounts at once, see “Scoring Functions”

Agreement

A number of the scales used have an agreement based scoring scheme. These have been standardised to the folowing scale:

1	2	3	4	5	6	7
Strongly Disagree	Moderately Disagree	Slightly Disagree	Neither Agree nor Disagree	Slightly Agree	Moderately Agree	Strongly Agree

Extent

The scales that measure extent use the following scale. due to the lack of symmetry for extent (there is no natural negation of extent like (dis)agree) only the anchors are used.

1	2	3	4	5	6	7
To No Extent At All						To a Great Extent

Frequency

The scales that measure frequency use the following scale:

1	2	3	4	5	6	7
Never	Very Infrequently	Infrequently	Sometimes	Frequently	Very Frequently	Always

Truth

The scales that examine truth use the following scale:

1	2	3	4	5	6	7
Absolutely Untrue	Mostly untrue	Somewhat Untrue	Can’t Say True or False	Somewhat True	Mostly True	Absolutely True