Assessment, Statistics, and Research

You can quickly reverse score survey items using widely available spreadsheets like Excel and Google Sheets or SPSS. For example, the freely available scale to measure Valor/ Bravery/ Courage has 10 items rated on a 1 – 5 scale. High scores represent more of the trait. But 4 items are worded as negative statements so, you have to reverse the item scores on the negative items to obtain a correct total score for courage. Sometimes test and survey creators refer to items as + or – keyed. Positive items are added together and the negative items must be reverse scored before adding to the total. Survey Items Example Following are the general directions for the 5-point rating from www.ipip.org Describe yourself as you generally are now, not as you wish to be in the future. Describe yourself as you honestly see yourself, in relation to other people you know of the same sex as you are, and roughly your same age. So that you can describe yourself in an honest ma

Lions of Kruger/ Geoff Sutton 2009 Courage is a virtue. Despite being an ancient virtue, courage is a relatively new topic of study in psychological science. As with any psychological concept, definitions can vary. Woodward and his colleagues have begun a line of inquiry, which includes a measurement scale. Here’s a 2007 definition: “Courage is the voluntary willingness to act, with or without varying levels of fear, in response to a threat to achieve an important, perhaps moral, outcome or goal. (p. 136)”      Read more about the psychology of courage. Factor analysis suggested participants identified three types of threats: Physical, social, and emotional. When scale items were analyzed, four factors emerged, which were categorized by the authors as follows: 1. work/employment courage 2. patriotic/religion/belief-based courage 3. social-moral courage 4. independent or family-based courage 23-item Measure A popular measure of courage is the

Can you measure love? Robert Sternberg thinks so. Early clinical perspectives on love can be found in the works of Freud and Maslow. But scientific approaches have looked at the many dimensions of love in the last few decades. One popular theory is the Triangular Theory of Love presented by Robert J. Sternberg . As the name implies, there are three constructs in this theory of interpersonal love: Intimacy, passion, and commitment/decision (see Sternberg, 1986, for an explanation). Sternberg referred to each with a "temperature" rating from hot to cool--see the parentheses below. Intimacy refers to lovers’ emotional investment in their relationship (feeling close, connected, bonded, a measure of "warmth"). Passion refers to lovers’ motivational involvement in their relationship (romance, attraction, sex, a measure of "hot"). Commitment/decision refer to lovers’ thoughts about their relationship in terms of decision (I lo