Characteristics of response scales are important factors in guiding cognitive processes underlying the choice of a response category in responding to the request for an answer on an attitude item. This paper deals with two different requests and two different response formats as well, yet addressing the same topic. For example, assessing the importance of an item to respondents one can ask directly for importance judgments (on a scale ranging from very important to unimportant) or one can formulate an item containing already the statement of importance and then offer a response scale ranging from agree to disagree. In both cases responses express respondents’ subjective importance of identical items and therefore responses can be expected to be similar on both response formats.
Compared are first, judgments of how important a job characteristic is to a respondent by offering a scale ranging from important to unimportant (f.e. high income is “very important”). Second, items expressing the importance of a job characteristic are presented by offering a response scale ranging from agree to disagree (f.e. Item: high income is very important to me; response category: scale from agree to disagree). Scale direction starting with either the negative or the positive response option can also be taken into account.
For all questions on both response formats a 7-point response scale was used. Respondents were students answering to an online questionnaire. Reported are results on questions about job motivation.
Based on repeated measures quality of measurement regarding reliability and validity of indicators is presented.