The Semantic Scale Network: An online tool to detect semantic overlap of psychological scales and prevent scale redundancies

Hannes Rosenbusch*, Florian Wanders, Ilse L. Pit

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleScientificpeer-review

45 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Psychological measurement and theory are afflicted with an ongoing proliferation of new constructs and scales. Given the often redundant nature of new scales, psychological science is struggling with arbitrary measurement, construct dilution, and disconnection between research groups. To address these issues, we introduce an easy-to-use online application: the Semantic Scale Network. The purpose of this application is to automatically detect semantic overlap between scales through latent semantic analysis. Authors and reviewers can enter the items of a new scale into the application, and receive quantifications of semantic overlap with related scales in the application's corpus. Contrary to traditional assessments of scale overlap, the application can support expert judgments on scale redundancy without access to empirical data or awareness of every potentially related scale. After a brief introduction to measures of semantic similarity in texts, we introduce the Semantic Scale Network and provide best practices for interpreting its outputs. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)380-392
JournalPsychological Methods
Volume25
Issue number3
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2020

Keywords

  • CRITERIA
  • EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT
  • GUIDE
  • INCREMENTAL VALIDITY
  • ISSUES
  • ITEM
  • REVIEWS
  • VALIDATION
  • decision support system
  • latent semantic analysis
  • network analysis
  • scale development
  • scale proliferation

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