ON THE DIMENSIONALITY OF 2-QUESTION FORMAT LIKERT ATTITUDE SCALES

Previous research indicates that Likert items do not result in unidime nsional ordinal. rating scales nor do they consistently permit the sep aration of Content and Intensity dimensions. An alternative strategy i s to present a separate Content (agree or disagree) item immediately f ollowed by an Intensity (strongly or not strongly) item. Panel data fr om the 1992 and 1994 American National Election Studies are used to st udy this strategy. The results indicate that Content and Intensity are sometimes confounded with the two-part questions, and also that the j oint responses to the Content and Intensity questions do not generally constitute a unidimensional scale. (C) 1997 Academic Press.