Investigation of Item Trends of Statistical Attitude Scale for Students Studying in Different Disciplines

Year 2020, , 41 - 49, 01.04.2020

Taner Tunç , Erdinç Kolay

https://doi.org/10.34248/bsengineering.665648

Abstract

In this study, the 17-item Likert-type Statistical Attitude Scale (SAS) was used to measure the attitudes of university students towards statistics courses. This scale was applied to 218 science students, 100 health sciences students and 135 social sciences students in various departments taking a statistics course. By applying ridit analysis to the obtained data, the tendency differences and togetherness of the scale items belonging to the sub-dimensions of the Statistical Attitude Scale were revealed in different disciplines. The ridit values were calculated for the ordinal scale variables in the statistical attitude scale. As a result of these calculations, the classes were compared and the classes in which the students tend according to the items in the scale were determined. Ridit intervals of 8 of the 17 items in the scale were not significant. Therefore, cases are evenly distributed to these 8 items. Five of the other 9 items were found to have ridit intervals less than 0.5 and items concentrated in sub-classes (disagreement) for these five items. The ridit ranges of the remaining 4 items were greater than 0.5 cases showed a tendency for these four items, in the upper classes (agreement).

Keywords

Likert, Statistical attitude scale, Ridit Analysis, Student, Different disciplines

References

• 1. Agresti, A. (1990), Categorical Data Analysis. New York: John Wily and Sons.
• 2. Beder, J.H., Heim, R.C., 1990. On the use of ridit analysis. Psychometrica, 55, 603-616.
• 3. Brockett, P.L., 1981. A note on the numerical assignment of scores to ranked categorical data. Journal of Mathematical Sociology, 8, 91-101.
• 4. Brockett, P.L., Levin, A., 1977. On a characterization of ridits. Annals of Statistics, 5, 1245-1248.
• 5. Bross, I.D.J., 1958. How to use ridit analysis. Biometrics, 14, 18-38.
• 6. Bross, I.D.J., 1960. How to cut the highway toll in half in the next ten years. Public Health Rep., 75, 573-581.
• 7. Davidson, R.C., 1984. Dissatisfaction of women family practice residents. Family Medicine, 16, 10-12.
• 8. Dennis, T.B., Pore, M.D., Terrell, G.R., 1980. Some properties of the ridit transformation. American Statistical Association, Proceedings of the Statistical Comp. Sec., 303-308.
• 9. Feld, W. S., 1985. When to intervene: the magic number called ridit, Health Care Strategic Management, Volume 3, 6, pp. 22-24.
• 10. Fleiss, J.L., 1973. Statistical Methods for rates and proportions. New York: Jon Wiley & Sons.
• 11. Fleiss, J.L., Chilton, N.W., Wallenstein, S., 1979. Ridit analysis in dental clinical studies. J. Dental Research, 58, 2080-2084.
• 12. Golden, L.L., Brockett, P.L., 1987. The effect of alternative scoring methods on the analysis of rank order categorical data. J. Mathematical Sociology, 12, 383-414.
• 13. Jansen, M.E., 1984. Ridit analysis, a review. Statistica Neerlandica, 38(3), 141-158.
• 14. Kantor, S., Winkelstein, W., İbrahim, M.A., 1968. A note on the interpretation of the ridit as a quantile rank. Amer. J. Epidemiol., 87, 609-615.
• 15. Likert, R.,1932. A Technique for the Measurement of Attitudes, NY:Archives of Psychology.
• 16. Levine, A., Roizen, P., Christensen, H., 1972. A mathematical method for analyzing questionnaires. Bulletion of the World Health Organization, 47, 87-97.
• 17. Lynch, G.W., 1978. A decision theoretic approach to ridits. Commun. Statist. Theor. Methods, A7, 607-614.
• 18. Selvin, S., 1977. A further note on the interpretation of Ridit Analysis. American J. of Epidemiology, 105:16-20.
• 19. Siegel, S., Castellan, J., 1988. Nonparametric statistics for the behavioral sciences. New York: McGraw-Hill.
• 20. Tunç T, Komitoğlu F., Bekiryazıcı Z., 2014. A Psychometric Scale For Determining University Students Attitudes Towards The Statistics Courses They Take Statistical Attitude Scale SAS. Energy Education Science And Technology Part B: Social And Educational Studies, 6(1), 15-24.
• 21. Wu Chien-Ho. 2007. On the Application of Grey Relational Analysis and RIDIT Analysis to Likert Scale Surveys, International Mathematical Forum, 2, no.14, 675 – 687.