Meltem Acar GÜVENDİR, Yeşim Özer ÖZKAN
Scaling was initially used in psychophysics, which is a subfield of psychology. Scaling can be considered as a process of developing a scaling tool and ranking the collected data at equal intervals according to the decided scale. The scaling operation is conducted according to the judgment and reaction rule. The judgment rule is a stimulus—oriented approach that takes an expert’s opinions into consideration. For the reaction rule, the scaling operation is done according to the reactions of the subjects. In the stimulus—oriented rule approach, stimulants are scaled by an observer’s or expert’s opinions. The paired comparison method, used within the judgment approach, was developed by Louis Leon Thurstone, and it has been used in psychology research (especially cognitive psychology) for 10 years. Simple paired comparison is a simple method. Within the paired comparison approach, the stimulant sets or items are decided by the researcher. Observers are provided with all of the possible pairs and required to compare these pairs according to a better particular criterion. An advantage of this approach is its inclusion of both simple and comparative judgments.
