Article View: sci.math.stat
Article #267Re: unweighted mean of means
From: Hume Winzar
Date: Thu, 03 Sep 1992 09:06
Date: Thu, 03 Sep 1992 09:06
31 lines
1933 bytes
1933 bytes
>I have some questionnaire data from which I wish to derive a "knowledge
>index" by taking the mean response to several of the questions.
>However, these are true-false questions and more of the questions are
>true than false. Moreover, many people are clearly disposed to choose
>True as a response rather than False. Of course, to the degree that
>they have this bias their knowledge index is inflated.
>I have solved this problem by taking the (unweighted) mean of the mean
>answer to false questions plus the mean answer to true questions.
An alternative is an approach often used for rescaling multiple choice
exams:
In this case there is a 50% probability of guessing a correct answer.
So all of the wrong answers must be about half of the guesses - the other
half of the guesses were correct by pure chance. After calculating the
probable number of guesses you can subtract this number from the total
number of questions. In this case it reduces to, for each person:
SCORE = N(correct) - N(wrong)
Of course this does not get you arround the systematic bias created by the
propensity to answer TRUE more often.
- - - - - - - - -
| _--_|\ | Hume Winzar
| / \ | Commerce School,
| *_.--._/ | Murdoch University,
| v | Perth, Western Australia
- - - - - - - - -
E_Mail winzar@csuvax1.csu.murdoch.edu.au
Phone: (09) 310 7389
Fax: (09) 310 5004
Technical Details
Message-ID:
<winzar.73.0@newsman>Path:
arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!sparky!uunet!munnari.oz.au!uniwa!newsman!newsman!winzarReferences:
<8edG3vu00WBN868HYr@andrew.cmu.edu>Show Full Headers
Complete Article Headers
Newsgroups: sci.math.stat Path: arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!sparky!uunet!munnari.oz.au!uniwa!newsman!newsman!winzar From: winzar@newsman (Hume Winzar) Subject: Re: unweighted mean of means Message-ID: <winzar.73.0@newsman> Sender: news@newsman.csu.murdoch.edu.au (News Man) Organization: Commerce, Murdoch University References: <8edG3vu00WBN868HYr@andrew.cmu.edu> Date: Thu, 3 Sep 92 09:06:05 GMT Lines: 31