أثر عدد بدائل الاستجابة في مقياس ليكرت على الخصائص السيكومترية للمقياس و قياس الاتجاهات : دراسة تطبيقية على متدربي معهد الإدارة العامة، المملكة العربية السعودية

Abstract EN

This research aimed at identifying the impact of the number of response alternatives of Likert-type scales on psychometric properties of the scale and attitudes measurement.

To achieve this goal, a questionnaire consisting of five items measuring organizational commitment was developed.

The five items were replicated four times corresponding to 3, 5, 7, and 9 Likert scale points.

The survey was conducted on a clustered random sample of 506 trainees from the Institute of Public Administration's trainees in 2014.

The total number of valid questionnaires received was 369, giving 72.9% response rate.

The research results showed that as the number of response alternatives increased, both reliability and validity improved.

The results also showed that increasing the number of response alternatives reduced the choice of "neutral" response, thus the discriminating power improved with the increasing number of response alternatives.

Moreover, the mean scores for 3-point scale was lower than the mean scores of higher Likert points.

As for education, the results showed that the mean score of highly educated individuals was lower than that of low educated individuals.

However, there was no sufficient evidence for the effect of age on measuring attitudes.

Based on these results, a number of recommendations were provided.