Measuring the Degree of Importance : A Comparison of Two Types of Rating Scales

A study was conducted to determine whether different importance rating scales would produce different results. Two different degree-of-importance scales were used to measure the importance of 12 factors in deciding where to work and 14 factors in deciding where to go to college. One scale, a more traditional scale, measured importance from “extremely important” to “not important.” The other scale, a less traditional scale, asked subjects to indicate the degree of importance only for those factors that subjects felt were at all important. The results showed that with a less traditional scale subjects were more likely to indicate that a factor was not important