How to score questionnaires

The standard practice in scoring questionnaires consists of adding item scores and standardizing these sums. We present a set of alternative procedures, consisting of (a) correcting for the acquiescence variance that disturbs the structure of the questionnaire; (b) establishing item weights through principal component analysis in order to obtain maximally reliable scale scores; (c) applying a procedure of hierarchically-nested circumplex construction to catch shades of meaning and thus facilitate interpretation; and (d) retaining absolute information by the use of anchored scores in addition to standard scores. In discussing circumplexical representations (c), we provide an illustration linking the three- and five-factorial conceptions of the personality trait domain. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.