Revilla, MelanieSaris, Willem E.Krosnick, Jon A.2017-03-242017-03-242009Choosing the number of categories in agree-disagree scaleshttp://hdl.handle.net/10230/28305Although agree-disagree (AD) rating scales suffer from acquiescence response bias, entail enhanced cognitive burden, and yield data of lower quality (Krosnick, 1991; Saris, Revilla, Krosnick, Schaeffer, forthcoming), these scales remain popular with researchers due to practical considerations (e.g., ease of item preparation, speed of administration, reduced administration costs). This paper shows that if researchers want to use AD scales, they should offer 5 answer categories rather than 7 or 11, because the latter yield data of lower quality. This is shown using data from four multitraitmultimethod (MTMM) experiments implemented in the third round of the European Social Survey. The quality of items with different rating scale lengths were computed and compared.application/pdfengThis is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium provided that the original work is properlyattributed.info:eu-repo/semantics/workingPaperinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess