Guttman Scaling

Guttman scaling or scalogram analysis was developed by Louis Guttman in an attempt to find a way to measure attitudes that would improve on what he perceived to be the limitations of Thurstone scaling and Likert-type scaling. Guttman believed that an individual’s attitude toward some psychological object could be measured by presenting the person with statements that had been ordered in terms of their favorableness or unfavorableness toward the target object. He theorized that a perfect scale would consist of a set of statements that were hierarchically cumulative in the sense that an individual who endorsed a particular statement would also endorse all less extreme statements in the set and that an individual who failed to endorse a given statement would not endorse any statements ...