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Constrained Dual Scaling for Detecting Response Styles in Categorical Data

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2025

Pieter C. Schoonees*
Affiliation:
Erasmus University Rotterdam
Michel van de Velden
Affiliation:
Erasmus University Rotterdam
Patrick J. F. Groenen
Affiliation:
Erasmus University Rotterdam
*
Correspondence should be made to Pieter C. Schoonees, Econometric Institute, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Email: schoonees@gmail.com
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Abstract

Dual scaling (DS) is a multivariate exploratory method equivalent to correspondence analysis when analysing contingency tables. However, for the analysis of rating data, different proposals appear in the DS and correspondence analysis literature. It is shown here that a peculiarity of the DS method can be exploited to detect differences in response styles. Response styles occur when respondents use rating scales differently for reasons not related to the questions, often biasing results. A spline-based constrained version of DS is devised which can detect the presence of four prominent types of response styles, and is extended to allow for multiple response styles. An alternating nonnegative least squares algorithm is devised for estimating the parameters. The new method is appraised both by simulation studies and an empirical application.

Information

Type
Original Paper
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
Copyright
Copyright © 2015 The Psychometric Society
Figure 0

Figure 1. Examples of (inverse) response style functions mapping the true item content scale (vertical axis) into the observed measurement scale (horizontal axis).

Figure 1

Table 1. Curvature properties of the four response styles.

Figure 2

Figure 2. The three I-spline basis functions for quadratic monotone splines with a single interior knot t\documentclass[12pt]{minimal}\usepackage{amsmath}\usepackage{wasysym}\usepackage{amsfonts}\usepackage{amssymb}\usepackage{amsbsy}\usepackage{mathrsfs}\usepackage{upgreek}\setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt}\begin{document}$$t$$\end{document}.

Figure 3

Figure 3. Classifying response styles graphically using the curvature properties of monotone quadratic splines.

Figure 4

Figure 4. Response styles used in the simulation study. Each curve represents a different style.

Figure 5

Table 2. Average adjusted Rand index for 50 simulations at the different parameter settings.

Figure 6

Table 3. Average hit rates for 50 simulations at the different parameter settings.

Figure 7

Figure 5. The effect of response styles on the underlying uncorrelated objects: estimated Pearson correlations before and after contamination, as well as after cleaning the data. The number of rating categories is q=5\documentclass[12pt]{minimal}\usepackage{amsmath}\usepackage{wasysym}\usepackage{amsfonts}\usepackage{amssymb}\usepackage{amsbsy}\usepackage{mathrsfs}\usepackage{upgreek}\setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt}\begin{document}$$q=5$$\end{document} for (a)–(c) and q=7\documentclass[12pt]{minimal}\usepackage{amsmath}\usepackage{wasysym}\usepackage{amsfonts}\usepackage{amssymb}\usepackage{amsbsy}\usepackage{mathrsfs}\usepackage{upgreek}\setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt}\begin{document}$$q=7$$\end{document} for (d)–(f), with m=20\documentclass[12pt]{minimal}\usepackage{amsmath}\usepackage{wasysym}\usepackage{amsfonts}\usepackage{amssymb}\usepackage{amsbsy}\usepackage{mathrsfs}\usepackage{upgreek}\setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt}\begin{document}$$m=20$$\end{document} items in all cases.

Figure 8

Figure 6. An example of the correlation structure imposed by the Clayton copula’s, in terms of Kendall’s τ\documentclass[12pt]{minimal}\usepackage{amsmath}\usepackage{wasysym}\usepackage{amsfonts}\usepackage{amssymb}\usepackage{amsbsy}\usepackage{mathrsfs}\usepackage{upgreek}\setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt}\begin{document}$$\tau $$\end{document}.

Figure 9

Table 4. Average proportional improvement in the RMSE of the cleaned over the contaminated data.

Figure 10

Table 5. Average proportional improvement in the RMSE when comparing the principal component loadings between the cleaned and contaminated data.

Figure 11

Figure 7. Scree plot for the sensory data.

Figure 12

Figure 8. The estimated response mappings for K=1\documentclass[12pt]{minimal}\usepackage{amsmath}\usepackage{wasysym}\usepackage{amsfonts}\usepackage{amssymb}\usepackage{amsbsy}\usepackage{mathrsfs}\usepackage{upgreek}\setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt}\begin{document}$$K = 1$$\end{document} (top left) to 8 (bottom right) groups, respectively. The area of the bubbles are proportional to how often that particular rating is used. The group sizes are also shown in a legend. Groups are labelled sequentially; the legend should be read vertically and then horizontally.

Figure 13

Table 6. The Kullback–Leibler divergence between the groups when K=5\documentclass[12pt]{minimal}\usepackage{amsmath}\usepackage{wasysym}\usepackage{amsfonts}\usepackage{amssymb}\usepackage{amsbsy}\usepackage{mathrsfs}\usepackage{upgreek}\setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt}\begin{document}$$K = 5$$\end{document}, based on the rating scale use per group.

Figure 14

Figure 9. Relative aggregate frequencies of rating scale use in the identified groups when K=5\documentclass[12pt]{minimal}\usepackage{amsmath}\usepackage{wasysym}\usepackage{amsfonts}\usepackage{amssymb}\usepackage{amsbsy}\usepackage{mathrsfs}\usepackage{upgreek}\setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt}\begin{document}$$K = 5$$\end{document}.

Figure 15

Figure 10. ad Relative frequencies of rating scale use for the chosen solution K=4\documentclass[12pt]{minimal}\usepackage{amsmath}\usepackage{wasysym}\usepackage{amsfonts}\usepackage{amssymb}\usepackage{amsbsy}\usepackage{mathrsfs}\usepackage{upgreek}\setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt}\begin{document}$$K=4$$\end{document}; and eh Variability of rating scale use within these groups, with each line representing a single individual.

Figure 16

Figure 11. a Optimal scores assigned to the K=4\documentclass[12pt]{minimal}\usepackage{amsmath}\usepackage{wasysym}\usepackage{amsfonts}\usepackage{amssymb}\usepackage{amsbsy}\usepackage{mathrsfs}\usepackage{upgreek}\setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt}\begin{document}$$K = 4$$\end{document} response style groups, from rating 1 (left) to rating 9 (right). b Curvature plot similar to Figure 3 for the four groups, with the axes now transformed to obtain a more symmetrical plot. The ellipse in the centre is an approximate 95 % confidence ellipse for no response style.

Figure 17

Figure 12. Optimal scores for each of the seven questions, separated by product and with similar items depicted by the same colours.

Figure 18

Figure 13. The spread of the loss values (scaled by a constant) for K=2,…,8\documentclass[12pt]{minimal}\usepackage{amsmath}\usepackage{wasysym}\usepackage{amsfonts}\usepackage{amssymb}\usepackage{amsbsy}\usepackage{mathrsfs}\usepackage{upgreek}\setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt}\begin{document}$$K = 2, \ldots , 8$$\end{document} in the empirical example, for 50 different starting configurations of G\documentclass[12pt]{minimal}\usepackage{amsmath}\usepackage{wasysym}\usepackage{amsfonts}\usepackage{amssymb}\usepackage{amsbsy}\usepackage{mathrsfs}\usepackage{upgreek}\setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt}\begin{document}$$\mathbf {G}$$\end{document}.