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In psychology and sociology, the Thurstone scale was the first formal technique to measure an attitude. It was developed by Louis Leon Thurstone in 1928, originally as a means of measuring attitudes towards religion. Today it is used to measure attitudes towards a wide variety of issues.
Although Thurstone referred to it as a law, as stated above, in terms of modern psychometric theory the 'law' of comparative judgment is more aptly described as a measurement model. It represents a general theoretical model which, applied in a particular empirical context, constitutes a scientific hypothesis regarding the outcomes of ...
The BTL model, the Thurstonian model as well as the Rasch model for measurement are all closely related and belong to the same class of stochastic transitivity. Thurstone used the method of pairwise comparisons as an approach to measuring perceived intensity of physical stimuli, attitudes, preferences, choices, and values.
A Thurstonian model is a stochastic transitivity model with latent variables for describing the mapping of some continuous scale onto discrete, possibly ordered categories of response. In the model, each of these categories of response corresponds to a latent variable whose value is drawn from a normal distribution , independently of the other ...
Louis Leon Thurstone (May 29, 1887 – September 29, 1955) [1] was an American pioneer in the fields of psychometrics and psychophysics.He conceived the approach to measurement known as the law of comparative judgment, and is well known for his contributions to factor analysis.
Symptom and attitude tests are more often called scales. A useful psychological test/scale must be both valid, i.e., show evidence that the test or scale measures what it is purported to measure, [1] [4]) and reliable, i.e., show evidence of consistency across items and raters and over time, etc.
For Thurstone, the objects were generally sensations, such as intensity, or attitudes, such as the seriousness of crimes, or statements of opinions. Social researchers continued to use the method, as did market researchers for whom the objects might be different hotel room layouts, or variations on a proposed new biscuit.
The definition of measurement in the social sciences has a long history. A current widespread definition, proposed by Stanley Smith Stevens, is that measurement is "the assignment of numerals to objects or events according to some rule." This definition was introduced in a 1946 Science article in which Stevens proposed four levels of ...