MANIPULATIONS OF EVALUATIVE RATING-SCALES TO INCREASE VALIDITY

Standard five-point rating scales often do not allow raters to capture perceived differences between objects or individuals within a relatively narrow band of the evaluative dimension. In the frequency domain, using a longer rating scale or packing the rating scale with labels from a particular portion of the dimension of interest have both been shown by Hancock and Klockars in 1991 to increase rating validity for differentiating among a narrow range of performances. The present study investigates the effect of similar manipulations on the validity of ratings from evaluative rating scales. The correlations of evaluative ratings with experimentally manipulated (and hence known) performance tended to be fairly high regardless of the evaluative scale used.