Thurstone scale

A Thurstone scale is a way of measuring opinions or attitudes. It is named after the American psychologist Louis L. Thurstone.

Thurstone scales use a series of questions about a topic, and each question has different possible answers that people can choose from. For example, if you wanted to measure people's attitudes about the environment, you might have a Thurstone scale that includes questions like: "How often do you recycle?", "How important do you think it is to reduce waste?", or "How serious of a problem is climate change?". Each of these questions have different possible answers, such as 'often' 'sometimes' 'rarely', or 'very important', 'somewhat important', 'not very important'.

The Thurstone scale then uses these answers to measure people's attitudes. It takes into account not just what people's answers are, but also how strong they feel about each answer. For example, if someone answered 'very important' to the question about reducing waste, their score would be higher than someone who answered 'somewhat important'. The scores can help researchers who want to know how people feel about a particular topic.