Bocklisch Franziska
Cognitive and Engineering Psychology, Department of Psychology, Technische Universität Chemnitz, Chemnitz, Germany.
Front Psychol. 2019 Jul 3;10:1559. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01559. eCollection 2019.
In psychological research, many questionnaires use verbal response scales with vague linguistic terms (e.g., frequency expressions). The words' meanings can be formalized and evaluated using fuzzy membership functions (MFs), which allow constructing distinct and equidistant response scales. The discriminatory power value of MFs indicates how distinct the functions and, hence, the verbal expressions are. The present manuscript interrogates the threshold of discriminatory power necessary to indicate a sufficient difference in meaning. Using an empirical validation procedure, participants ( = 133) estimated (1) three correspondence values for verbal expressions to determine MFs, and (2) similarities of words by pairwise comparison ratings. Results show a non-linear relationship between discriminatory power and similarity, and fuzzy MFs, as well as the searched-for threshold value for discriminatory power. Implications for the selection of verbal expressions and the construction of verbal categories in questionnaire response scales are discussed.
在心理学研究中，许多问卷使用带有模糊语言术语（如频率表达）的言语反应量表。这些词的含义可以通过模糊隶属函数（MFs）进行形式化和评估，模糊隶属函数允许构建不同且等距的反应量表。MFs的辨别力值表明这些函数以及言语表达的差异程度。本手稿探讨了表明意义上有足够差异所需的辨别力阈值。通过实证验证程序，参与者（n = 133）估计：（1）言语表达的三个对应值以确定MFs，以及（2）通过成对比较评分来估计词语的相似度。结果显示了辨别力与相似度、模糊MFs以及所寻求的辨别力阈值之间的非线性关系。讨论了问卷反应量表中言语表达的选择和言语类别的构建所涉及的问题。
