The Psychophysical Scaling and Validation of a Political Support Scale

The aims of this paper are twofold: first, to illustrate the utility of psychophysical scaling methods in building reliable and valid scales of social opinion, and second, to report research findings on the development and validation of a scale for measuring support for political phenomena. The scaling experiments reported here provide compelling evidence of the successful extension of psychophysics from the measurement of sensory phenomena to the measurement of political opinion. In contrast to alternative scaling techniques, these psychophysical scaling methods provide a means to develop interval or ratio scales and assign meaningful values to the scale items. A thirty-item adjectival scale is tested and found to be a reliable, regression-free, and psychophysically valid instrument for measuring the degree of support for political institutions, policies, and roles. The range of the General Support Scale is approximately 100:1. Intervally spaced items may be selected from this scale for use in a survey instrument.