ArticleBehavior research methods2021
Beyond Likert ratings: Improving the robustness of developmental research measurement using best-worst scaling.
Article in Behavior research methods, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 18 citations in OpenAlex.
- A Health-Related Digital Ecological Momentary Assessment in Children (Aged 5- 11 Years): Systematic Review.Journal of medical Internet research · 2026Pooled it
- Comparing color qualia structures through a similarity task in young children versus adults.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Article
- Assessing patient information needs for new antidiabetic medications to inform shared decision-making: A best-worst scaling experiment in China.Health expectations : an international journal of public participation in health care and health policy · 2024Article
- Patient preferences, regret, and health-related quality of life among older adults with acute myeloid leukemia: A pilot longitudinal study.Journal of geriatric oncology · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Some of the 'best practice' approaches to ensuring reproducibility of research can be difficult to implement in the developmental and clinical domains, where sample sizes and session lengths are constrained by the practicalities of recruitment and testing. For this reason, an important area of improvement to target is the reliability of measurement. Here we demonstrate that best-worst scaling (BWS) provides a superior alternative to Likert ratings for measuring children's subjective impressions. Seventy-three children aged 5-6 years rated the trustworthiness of faces using either Likert ratings or BWS over two sessions. Individual children's ratings in the BWS condition were significantly more consistent from session 1 to session 2 than those in the Likert condition, a finding we also replicate with a large adult sample (N = 72). BWS also produced more reliable ratings at the group level than Likert ratings in the child sample. These findings indicate that BWS is a developmentally appropriate response format that can deliver substantial improvements in reliability of measurement, which can increase our confidence in the robustness of findings with children.
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Registered trials
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