Sample question presented using a five-point Likert item
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individuals who are neither happy nor unhappy will respond neither agree nor disagree, individuals who are happy will agree and individuals who are
completely happy will agree strongly. But this is not the case. It is not at all clear where individuals should place themselves on the agreedisagree scale if they are
―not usually happy.‖ They may disagree but where should they place themselves? To solve this problem they can use deferent solutions for deferent
items which would lead to lower reliability. They can also use a similar solution for deferent items and if this solution is deferent for deferent individuals this will
lead to a method affect and consequently to lower validity because the score is not only influenced by their opinion but also by a response pattern. For example,
it is possible that some individuals interpret the ―strongly‖ as a way to say that
individuals are more at the extreme on the considered scale: they are always happy or unhappy. However, as Fowler 1995 suggested, others could interpret
the ―strongly‖ as the intensity of their opinion: how sure heshe is about the fact that heshe is happy or unhappy? Thus, even an individual who is generally
neither happy nor unhappy can end up not only expressing disagreement with the statement about happiness above, but also expressing it strongly. Offering
―neither agree nor disagree‖ as a response option would not necessarily prevent this sort of problem, since an individ
ual who is confident that heshe is generally neither happy nor unhappy might well be inclined to strongly disagree in this
case. When this sort of mismatch of the response dimension to the latent construct of interest occurs, it will compromise the validity of responses Saris,
2010.