semantic differential
a type of scale that researchers use to assess a respondent’s views on a certain topic (e.g., a stimulus such as a word or photograph, the quality of some experience). Participants are asked to rate the topic on a scale that has pairs of opposites, such as bad–good, unpleasant–pleasant, or competitive–cooperative, as anchors or reference points. For example, the bipolar opposites bad and good may be scaled along 7 points and the respondent asked to position himself or herself along the 7-point continuum for a given topic. Generally, the anchors are focused on three dimensions—evaluation, activity, and potency. Responses to word pairs assessing the evaluative dimension are scaled in some way (e.g., according to theory, by exploratory factor analysis) so that items can be averaged or summed to arrive at an index of attitudes. This procedure is one of the most widely used methods of
assessing attitudes and may be used in psychometric testing or in various settings, such as marketing and politics, to gauge public reactions to a product, issue, or personality. See also attitude object; direct attitude measure. [developed in the 1950s by U.S. psychologists Charles E. Osgood, George J. Suci, and Percy H. Tannenbaum (1927–2009)]