Scales from our Lab
In the course of our research, we have occasionally needed to develop scales to measure the level of people’s abilities, traits, or attitudes. Below are some of these scales, which are available to anyone for research purposes. (click on the name of a scale for a downloadable PDF file with the scale, scoring instructions, and associated references.)
The One-item Mate Values Scale: One of my students and I wanted to look at the relationship between mate value and gender differences in self-esteem. There was not a scale to measure self-perceived mate value at the time, so we created this simple question for people to rate their own mate value. After that, more complex mate value scales were developed, but this single-item version holds up surprisingly well.
The Health Behaviors Survey: One of my first graduate students, James Daugherty, developed this survey to measure how often people engaged in healthy (and unhealthy) behaviors. We then compared those results to different measures of time discounting.
The Attitudes towards Babies Scale: We were interested in measuring if there was such a thing as “baby fever”, an idea in popular thought but not studied in psychology. To that end we developed this scale through a process of peer nominated behaviors and validation with several samples.
The Online Water Level Task: Trey Hill and I wanted to study the relationship between visuospatial ability and statistical reasoning. One of the measures we used for visuospatial ability is a computer-friendly version of the classic Inhelder and Piaget “water level” task.
The Multiple Choice General Numeracy Scale: Trey Hill, Kevin Kenny, and I developed a numerical literacy (numeracy) scale that is faster and easier for people to take than a commonly used scale (by Lipkus). We converted all the questions to multiple choice, make a few other improvements, and validated it. By making the answer format consistent across all the questions, the underlying factor structure is a bit less complicated.
The Sets Theory Test and Sets Theory Test II: In Brase (2021) the goal was to see which individual differences best predict Bayesian reasoning abilities. Numerical literacy and visuospatial ability were known to have some predictive ability, but there did not appear to be any measures of abilities to perceive and reason about nested sets. These are two measures we developed to assess ability to understand nested sets.
