The Effect of Rating Scale on Response Style: Experimental Evidence for Job Satisfaction

in Journal of Well-Being Assessment (2020)

This paper explores the relationship between rating scales and response style using experimental data from a sample of 1500 households of the Innovation Panel (2008) which is part of the Understanding ... [more ▼]

This paper explores the relationship between rating scales and response style using experimental data from a sample of 1500 households of the Innovation Panel (2008) which is part of the Understanding Society database. Two random groups of individuals are being asked about their level of job satisfaction using a self-assessment questionnaire through two (7 and 11 points) rating options. By comparing the two groups, we explore the effects of the different rating scales on Extreme Response Style (ERS). The experimental design of the data enables us to show that both high and low Extreme Response Style (ERS) are correlated with personal and demographic characteristics. In addition, when comparing the shorter to a longer scale, we show that the survey design may generates tendency to choose responses at the extreme values of the distribution. [less ▲]

Body Mass Index and Social Interactions from Adolescence to Adulthood

Scientific Conference (2018, July)

This paper proposes a novel approach to address identi fication of social endogenous e ects by generalizing the methods commonly used in standard dynamic panel data analysis to the peer e ffects setting ... [more ▼]

This paper proposes a novel approach to address identi fication of social endogenous e ects by generalizing the methods commonly used in standard dynamic panel data analysis to the peer e ffects setting. Our methodology shows to can estimate peer e ects free of the \re "reflection problem" in a dynamic context where individual- and group-specifi c unobservable e ects are controlled for. We apply a dynamic linear-in-means model for analyzing the importance of social ties for the body-weight-related behavior of US youth. We show that the main drivers of body-weight-related behavior are habituation and imitation eff ects. For individuals who were normal-weight during adolescence habits seem to be slightly enforced by imitative behavior: in this instance, for an 1% increase in average BMI we expect about 0:6% increase in individual BMI, whereas the coe cient for past BMI is 0:4%. Imitation e ffects, instead, explain most of the variation in the Body Mass Index of individuals who were overweight and obese during adolescence, signaling the presence of a social multiplier e ffect: for these two groups an increase of 1% in average BMI leads, respectively, to an increase of 0:2% and 0:4% in current BMI. [less ▲]