the situation in which the response format on a measure includes too few options to reflect a respondent’s actual behavior, opinion, or belief. For example, if an item pertains to average time spent watching television each day and a scale ranging from none (1) to 1 houror more (5) is used, the upper end of the scale is likely to be selected by the great majority of sampled respondents, some of whom watch many hours per day; this results in little ability to differentiate the sample in terms of how many hours are actually watched. See ceiling effect; floor effect.