An ordinal scaling method for questionnaire and other ordinal data

Abstract

This paper reports the development and application of a method for ordering persons and items (or stimuli) when responses are ordinal. The method applies most directly to data where responses are dichotomous, indicating agreement or acceptableness or similarity, and can be assumed to reflect proximity rather than dominance. It orders rows and columns of the response matrix into "parallelogram" form, using pairwise interchange procedures, followed by other steps. The method was applied to several sets of questionnaire data and one set of archeological data, with reasonable success. Other applications and extensions are suggested. Index terms: Dichotomous responses, Interchange methods, Ordinal scaling, Parallelogram scaling, Proximity data, Questionnaire responses.