The method of equal-appearing intervals or the Thurstone scale is used to measure attitudes of people. Logframer allows you to use a Thurstone scale to measure an indicator, but developing such a scale is not so simple.
This kind of scale is used to measure people's attitude towards a fairly clear and unidimensional concept, using a number of statements that vary in how they express a positive or negative opinion about the main concept. We'll briefly explain the steps of developing a Thurstone scale:
For a detailed example, see http://www.socialresearchmethods.net/kb/scalthur.php
You can now use the scale to measure attitudes 'in the field': enter the list of statements and use them to interview people or present them in a document. For each item, they should express whether they agree or disagree. The total score of a person is calculated by making the sum of the values of all the statements they agreed with, divided by the number of items he agreed on (in other words, the average of the statements they agreed with).
When you set the Question type to 'Scale (Thurstone)', you will get an empty table with the usual 'Labels' column, and two classes: 'Agree' and 'Disagree'. You can change the headers of these columns any way you want, but make sure that the second column remains the favourable option and the last column the unfavourable option.
To change the column headers, click somewhere in the column, and then on the button. You can also double-click on the column header itself. This will make a text field appear, where you can modify the header of this column.
To add the statements that make up your scale, go to the first row and enter them in the 'Label' column.
Every time you add a statement, you will see a value appear in the 'Agree' column (second column). The first statement will get 1, the second 2 and so on. In other words, Logframer assumes that the first statement is the first one on your scale and so on. But if you want to randomize your statements and use different values than the ones that are generated automatically you can do so.
If you want to change the values that are automatically inserted when you add a new statement, just click on the cell and type another value of your scale. You can only modify the 'Agree' column, not the 'Disagree' column.