RT info:eu-repo/semantics/article
T1 Incorporating respondents’ perceptions into ordinal scales. Measuring the confidence in political leaders
A1 Velasco Monje, Sergio
A1 González del Pozo, Raquel
A1 García Lapresta, José Luis
K1 Economía aplicada
K1 Métodos de investigación
K1 Comportamiento político
K1 Estadística
K1 Economía política
K1 Confianza política
K1 Escalas ordinales
K1 Medidas de proximidad ordinal
K1 Puntuaciones
K1 Encuestas de opinión
K1 5902 Ciencias Políticas
K1 1209 Estadística
AB Ordinal scales play a crucial role in the measurement of confidence in politicians. A common approach to investigate the status of public opinion involves conducting surveys that utilize ordered response categories. Evenly assigning scores to response categories is a common technique when analyzing survey results, whether done intentionally or implicitly. When doing so, it is usually assumed that respondents perceive equal proximities between the different response categories. Caution is essential when assigning scores, since this is most likely not true. To address this concern, this article proposes the application of a scoring function based on the concept of ordinal proximity measure. This function assigns scores to response categories of the ordinal scale considering respondents’ perceptions of closeness between response categories. These methods were applied to a survey on confidence in the Spanish Prime Minister by the Spanish Sociological Research Center (CIS). A small exploratory survey was conducted on perceived proximities between response categories in the CIS survey and aimed to replicate results using statistical regression models, highlighting potential biases when ignoring perceptions of response category proximities. While the findings offer insight into the method’s analytical implications, they are illustrative in nature and should not be overinterpreted as generalizable.
PB Springer Nature
SN 1120-2890
YR 2026
FD 2026
LK https://uvadoc.uva.es/handle/10324/83822
UL https://uvadoc.uva.es/handle/10324/83822
LA eng
NO Economia Politica, 2026 (Version of record)
NO Producción Científica
DS UVaDOC
RD 28-mar-2026