One failing of Likert-formatted rating scales is that they are ordinal scales. This limits the possible computations. To solve this problem 63 women participated in a methodological study in which Cantril's 1965 “ladder” technique was used to develop equal-interval scales with true zero points, referenced in the individuals' own experience. Each subject generated a list of life events corresponding to 9 rungs of a ladder, ranging from “no emotional arousal” to “the most moving event” in her life. This provided a scale for each subject which subsequently could be used to assess other events in her life, while allowing the full range of parametric statistics.
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