Marketing Research for Profitability Prof.

Venkatesh Shankar

Practice Problems in Attitude Measurement and Scaling

Identify the type of scale (nominal, ordinal, interval, ratio) being used in each of the
following questions. Justify your answer.

1. The analysis for each of the questions is given below the corresponding question. Is
the analysis appropriate for the scale used?

a. During which season of the year were you born?

____Winter _____Spring _____Summer ____Fall

About 50% of the sample was born in the fall, 25% of the sample was born in the
spring, and the remaining 25% was born in the winter. It can be concluded that the
fall is twice as popular as the spring and the summer seasons.

b. What was your total household income? _____

The average income is $25,000. There are twice as many households with an income
of less than $9,999 than households with an income of $40,000 and over.

c. Which are your three most preferred brands of cars? Rank them from 1 to 3
according to your preference, with 1 as most preferred,
____ Toyota ____Pontiac ____ Saturn
____ Honda ____Buick ____ Chrysler
____ Nissan ____Ford ____ Dodge

Ford is the most preferred brand. The mean preference is 1.52.

d. How much time do you spend a day traveling to school every day?
____under 5 min ____16-20 min
____5-10 min ____over 20 min
____11-15 min

The median time spent on traveling to school is 8.5 minutes. There are three times as
many respondents traveling less than 5 minutes than respondents traveling 16-20
minutes.

e. How satisfied are you with Newsweek magazine?

____very satisfied ____dissatisfied
____satisfied ____very dissatisfied
____neither satisfied nor dissatisfied

The average satisfaction score is 4.5, which seems to indicate a high level of
satisfaction with Newsweek magazine.
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f. On an average, how many cans/bottles of colas do you drink in a day?

____over 5 cans/bottles ____less than 2 cans/bottles
____2-5 cans/bottles

10% of the respondents drink less than 2 cans of colas a day whereas three times as
many respondents drink over 5 cans of cola a day.

g. Which one of the following courses have you taken?

____marketing research ____sales management
____adv. management ____consumer behavior

Marketing research is the most frequently taken course because the median is 3.2.

h. What is the level of education for the head of the household?

____some high school ____some college
____high school grad ____college grad

The response indicates that 40% of the sample have some high school education, 25%
of the sample are high school graduates, 20% have some college education, and 10%
are college graduates. The mean education level is 2.6.

2. The following question is on semantic differential scale in the context of comparative

advertising, measurement scales, and data analysis.

Suppose you see an advertisement that claims that Vital capsules are 50 per cent more
effective in easing tension than the leading tranquilizers, Restease. As the research
director of the firm that produces Restease, you immediately begin comparison tests.
Using large sample sizes and a well-designed experiment, you have one group of
individuals use Vital capsules and a second group use Restease. You then have each
individual in each group rate the effectiveness of the brand they tried on a five-point
scale as follows:

For easing tension, I found Vital (Restease) to be

a. ____ b._____ c._____ d._____ e._____

Very Effective Neither Ineffective Very
effective effective nor ineffective
ineffective

For analysis, you decide to code the “very effective” response as +2; the “effective”
response as +1; the “neither-nor” response as 0; the “ineffective” response as -1; and
the “very ineffective” response as -2. This is a common way of coding data of this
nature.
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You calculate an average response for Vital and Restease and obtain scores of 1.2 and
0.8 respectively. Because the 0.4 difference is 50 per cent more than the 0.8 level
obtained by your brand, you conclude that the claims for Vital are valid. Shortly after
reaching this conclusion, one of your assistants, who was also analyzing they data,
enters your office with the good news that Vital was viewed as only 10.5 per cent
more effective than Restease. Immediately, you examine his figures. He used that
same data and made no computational mistakes. The only difference was that he
assigned a “very ineffective” response at +1 and continued up to a +5 for the “very
effective” response. This is also a widely used procedure.

Then, as you are puzzling over these results, another member of your department
enters. She used the same approach as your assistant but assigned a +5 to “very
ineffective” and a +1 to “very effective.” Again, with no computational errors, she
found Vital to be 18.2 per cent more effective. What do you conclude?

Source: Derived from B. Venkatesh, “Unthinking Data Interpretation Can Destroy Value of Research,”
Marketing News, January 27, 1978, 6, 9. Both brand names are completely fictitious.