Rejoinder to Sherif
O.W. Markey[1]
Educational Policy Research Center
Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, California
The scaling artifact intrinsic to the method of ordered alternatives, as presented by Markley in 1971, is defended from the comments by Sherif. The essential conclusion of the 1971 articles remains unchanged.
Sherif's (1972) detailed attack on my critique (Markley, 1971) of the method of ordered alternatives is interesting but, for the most part, specious. Her comments regarding "equal intervals," however, reveal a central misunderstanding of the analysis.
In constructing the set of "didactic responses" on which the critique was based, the central assumption was not that each item of the scale, had an equal interval on a dimension of extremity, but rather that each of three sets of responses (which differed in extremity) had equal intervals for acceptance, noncommitment, and rejection of items. Thus the assumptions underlying the method of ordered alternatives were not violated.
I did not deny that extremity and involvement are usually related, nor that differences in involvement are reflected by differences in the latitude of rejection. The problem is simply that this reflection is contaminated by a scaling artifact intrinsic to the scoring of the method of ordered alternatives. Thus this method is a dubious measure of involvement across respondents of differing extremity—a conclusion that still seems valid.
REFERENCES
MARKLEY, O. W. Latitude of rejection. An artifact of own position. Psychological Bulletin, 1971, 75, 357-359.
SHERIF, C. W. Comment on interpretation of latitude of rejection as an "artifact." Psychological Bulletin, 1972, 78, 476-478.
(Received June 1, 1971)
