What Is a Verbal Agreement Scale?

A verbal agreement scale is a composite score that is created by summing or averaging scores from several items of a survey that contains multiple verbal agreement items. A verbal agreement item is a survey question in which a respondent indicates the extent to which they agree or disagree with a statement.

Verbal Agreement Items

• Most surveys are constructed as a list of statements, or items, which are presented to a respondent, who then circles a number to describe the extent to which they agree or disagree with each of the statements.

Anchors

• To qualify as a verbal agreement item, there must be at least two "anchors," which are typically verbal descriptors comprised of a word or phrase to denote the meaning of the numbers that the respondent circles. For example, an item such as "I like reading about verbal agreement scales" could be followed by the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. Above the number 1 an anchor might indicate "Strongly Disagree," and above the number 5 it could indicate "Strongly Agree."

Item Scaling

• Items may have as few as two choices ("Agree" and "Disagree"), but can have more numeric options to allow for the expression of degree of agreement or disagreement. Typically items will have four to seven numeric options.

Scales versus Items

• Technically, a scale must be comprised of several items, which are summed or averaged. Some people loosely and inappropriately refer to a single verbal agreement item with multiple numeric options as a "scale."

Advantages of Scales

• Multi-item scales have desirable psychometric properties compared to single-item indicators of verbal agreement. For example, scales have greater reliability and greater "dispersion" or spread of scores, making the scores amenable to more powerful and refined statistical analysis.