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Introducing a Method for Intervals Correction on Multiple Likert Scales: A Case Study on an Urban Soundscape Data Collection Instrument

Likert scales are useful for collecting data on attitudes and perceptions from large samples of people. In particular, they have become a well-established tool in soundscape studies for conducting in situ surveys to determine how people experience urban public spaces. However, it is still unclear wh...

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Autores principales: Lionello, Matteo, Aletta, Francesco, Mitchell, Andrew, Kang, Jian
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7862575/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33551915
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.602831
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author Lionello, Matteo
Aletta, Francesco
Mitchell, Andrew
Kang, Jian
author_facet Lionello, Matteo
Aletta, Francesco
Mitchell, Andrew
Kang, Jian
author_sort Lionello, Matteo
collection PubMed
description Likert scales are useful for collecting data on attitudes and perceptions from large samples of people. In particular, they have become a well-established tool in soundscape studies for conducting in situ surveys to determine how people experience urban public spaces. However, it is still unclear whether the metrics of the scales are consistently interpreted during a typical assessment task. The current work aims at identifying some general trends in the interpretation of Likert scale metrics and introducing a procedure for the derivation of metric corrections by analyzing a case study dataset of 984 soundscape assessments across 11 urban locations in London. According to ISO/TS 12913-2:2018, soundscapes can be assessed through the scaling of 8 dimensions: pleasant, annoying, vibrant, monotonous, eventful, uneventful, calm, and chaotic. The hypothesis underlying this study is that a link exists between correlations across the percentage of assessments falling in each Likert scale category and a dilation/compression factor affecting the interpretation of the scales metric. The outcome of this metric correction value derivation is introduced for soundscape, and a new projection of the London soundscapes according to the corrected circumplex space is compared with the initial ISO circumplex space. The overall results show a general non-equidistant interpretation of the scales, particularly on the vibrant-monotonous direction. The implications of this correction have been demonstrated through a Linear Ridge Classifier task for predicting the London soundscape responses using objective acoustic parameters, which shows significant improvement when applied to the corrected data. The results suggest that the corrected values account for the non-equidistant interpretation of the Likert metrics, thereby allowing mathematical operations to be viable when applied to the data.
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spelling pubmed-78625752021-02-06 Introducing a Method for Intervals Correction on Multiple Likert Scales: A Case Study on an Urban Soundscape Data Collection Instrument Lionello, Matteo Aletta, Francesco Mitchell, Andrew Kang, Jian Front Psychol Psychology Likert scales are useful for collecting data on attitudes and perceptions from large samples of people. In particular, they have become a well-established tool in soundscape studies for conducting in situ surveys to determine how people experience urban public spaces. However, it is still unclear whether the metrics of the scales are consistently interpreted during a typical assessment task. The current work aims at identifying some general trends in the interpretation of Likert scale metrics and introducing a procedure for the derivation of metric corrections by analyzing a case study dataset of 984 soundscape assessments across 11 urban locations in London. According to ISO/TS 12913-2:2018, soundscapes can be assessed through the scaling of 8 dimensions: pleasant, annoying, vibrant, monotonous, eventful, uneventful, calm, and chaotic. The hypothesis underlying this study is that a link exists between correlations across the percentage of assessments falling in each Likert scale category and a dilation/compression factor affecting the interpretation of the scales metric. The outcome of this metric correction value derivation is introduced for soundscape, and a new projection of the London soundscapes according to the corrected circumplex space is compared with the initial ISO circumplex space. The overall results show a general non-equidistant interpretation of the scales, particularly on the vibrant-monotonous direction. The implications of this correction have been demonstrated through a Linear Ridge Classifier task for predicting the London soundscape responses using objective acoustic parameters, which shows significant improvement when applied to the corrected data. The results suggest that the corrected values account for the non-equidistant interpretation of the Likert metrics, thereby allowing mathematical operations to be viable when applied to the data. Frontiers Media S.A. 2021-01-22 /pmc/articles/PMC7862575/ /pubmed/33551915 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.602831 Text en Copyright © 2021 Lionello, Aletta, Mitchell and Kang. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
spellingShingle Psychology
Lionello, Matteo
Aletta, Francesco
Mitchell, Andrew
Kang, Jian
Introducing a Method for Intervals Correction on Multiple Likert Scales: A Case Study on an Urban Soundscape Data Collection Instrument
title Introducing a Method for Intervals Correction on Multiple Likert Scales: A Case Study on an Urban Soundscape Data Collection Instrument
title_full Introducing a Method for Intervals Correction on Multiple Likert Scales: A Case Study on an Urban Soundscape Data Collection Instrument
title_fullStr Introducing a Method for Intervals Correction on Multiple Likert Scales: A Case Study on an Urban Soundscape Data Collection Instrument
title_full_unstemmed Introducing a Method for Intervals Correction on Multiple Likert Scales: A Case Study on an Urban Soundscape Data Collection Instrument
title_short Introducing a Method for Intervals Correction on Multiple Likert Scales: A Case Study on an Urban Soundscape Data Collection Instrument
title_sort introducing a method for intervals correction on multiple likert scales: a case study on an urban soundscape data collection instrument
topic Psychology
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7862575/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33551915
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.602831
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