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Label Scale and Rating Scale in Subjective Well-Being Measurement

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Metrics of Subjective Well-Being: Limits and Improvements

Part of the book series: Happiness Studies Book Series ((HAPS))

Abstract

The focus of this work is on the use of two instruments in the measurement of life satisfaction for subjective well-being studies: label scale and rating scale. The “label scale” refers to a set of ordered verbal response categories, and the “rating scale” refers to a bounded and discrete scale of numeric integers. The comparison between the two instruments is made with the objective to compare two different tools in order to identify advantages and disadvantages of each part of the survey of satisfaction of life and to build a proposal of correspondence between the categories of responses of two different instruments. The comparison is made using multivariate techniques, in particular the correspondence analysis, with stair-like intervals, to create a greater distance between the response categories.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Canada is carrying out a project in a way similar to the Project BES, on the well-being measurement. However, unlike the Italian experts, the Canadians identified 10 dimensions of well-being: work, home, family life, social participation, leisure, health, safety, environment, financial security, and education. These dimensions do not include the one closely related to the recognition of subjective well-being, as it does in Italy. It has been proposed as part of this project, to analyze why the rating scale ends with only the categories 9 and 10.

  2. 2.

    The term “enough” means “very” in Southern Italy, because of the similarity between the Italian word for enough “abbastanza” and the spanish word “bastante” which means “very”.

  3. 3.

    The main references are studies related to the Likert scale (Amisano, Rinaldi, & Pampanin, 2002; Macri & Marradi, 2012). In the case of Likert scale in the abscissa we found the degree of agreement explicitly required by the scale, in this case we work with tools that are asking to express their level of satisfaction, then the second dimension will be, as required by the instrument, “satisfaction.”

References

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Florence, Florence, Italy

    Ester Macri

Authors
  1. Ester Macri
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Correspondence to Ester Macri .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Happiness Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam Happiness Studies, Rotterdam, The Netherlands

    Gaël Brulé

  2. Dipartimento di Scienze Statistiche, Università di Roma "La Sapienza" , Roma, Italy

    Filomena Maggino

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Macri, E. (2017). Label Scale and Rating Scale in Subjective Well-Being Measurement. In: Brulé, G., Maggino, F. (eds) Metrics of Subjective Well-Being: Limits and Improvements. Happiness Studies Book Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61810-4_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61810-4_9

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-61809-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-61810-4

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