title: Women retrospectively identify and weight the emotional events of their lives: exploration of a scaling technique.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Michigan State University, East Lansing 48224-1030.
authors.forename: R E
authors.initials: RE
authors.lastname: Lee
authors.forename: D
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Brann
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001290:Attitude; D004644:Emotions; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008016:Life Change Events; D008875:Middle Aged; D010555:Personality Inventory