Strongly held beliefs reduce response-set bias in survey measures

Evidence

The Christian Orthodoxy Scale in turn shows almost no yea-saying or naysaying. People usually have definite reactions to the issues raised, and some High RWAs go through the test giving +4’s to every single protrait item and — 4’s to every single contrait (EOF, p. 220.) This faithfulness to content contributes to the great internal consistency of that test. — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 816

Categorization

• XREF: Directly echoes the reliability/validity discussion of the RWA Scale in the prior chapter of this same book, showing the contrast in internal consistency across instruments within Altemeyer’s own toolkit. — connects to: Treating Likert responses as interval data distorts estimates when aggregating across disparate items — Ruiqian Li and Paul Froese, The Duality of American Christian…, 96