{"id":97,"date":"2009-01-28T16:26:00","date_gmt":"2009-01-28T21:26:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.davidhowardpsychologist.com\/blog\/?p=97"},"modified":"2009-01-28T16:26:00","modified_gmt":"2009-01-28T21:26:00","slug":"likert-who","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.davidhowardpsychologist.com\/blog\/?p=97","title":{"rendered":"Likert Who?"},"content":{"rendered":"
It\u2019s hard to escape them. The phone rings, typically as the family gathers round the dinner table; and then the query: \u201cCan I have a few minutes of your time?\u201d We all have strategies (some passive, some not so) for dealing with the ubiquity of telemarketing and its blood-brother, the telesurvey. Nicola\u2019s personal favourite is to feign distress that, yes they could \u2013 but it\u2019s usually her husband who answers all questions; and he\u2019s not due to be released for some time. I try to stick a little closer to the facts (maybe she knows something that I don\u2019t!). No, Mr. Adair doesn\u2019t live here anymore (this is a true statement \u2013 as the phrasing goes). Or, in my more generous moments, I just acquiesce; as much fallout from having a possible future son in law who is one of those folks on the other end of the survey and has quite likely had all the abuse he can swallow for one day.<\/p>\n

\u201cOn a scale of 1 to whatever, could you please rate the following statements? \u20181\u2019 being \u2018strongly agree\u2019; \u2018whatever\u2019, being \u2018I don\u2019t ever want to hear another of your questions for as long as you may choose to live\u2019.\u201d \u201cSure, I guess.\u201d \u201cAre you married?\u201d \u201cYes.\u201d \u201cNo, sir; using the rating scale I described, please.\u201d \u201cOK, 1\u201d. \u201cIf you answered \u20181\u2019 to the previous question, could you please rate\u2026 \u201d And so it goes: a (painfully) long list of queries that produce (no doubt) a dog\u2019s breakfast of irrelevant information that will be quantified, averaged, standard deviationed, and ultimately passed on to the company who hired this underpaid, abused individual to stick it out to the end\u2026 and then do it all again. Talk about Groundhog Day! Much as I hate to admit it, these litanies of meaningless inquiry do compel me, on those generous occasions when I agree to participate, to listen to the question and, God forbid, think about my answers.<\/p>\n

Something approaching a high point in my week of mornings is Friday \u2013 the day the Globe and Mail includes, in their Review<\/em> section, the entertaining, acerbic, droll, and frequently insightful review of the recently released movies. Time to fess up; I\u2019m a movie nut \u2013 not just any movie but one that might steer me to the next good book on which one was based; or maybe just the next candidate for what Nicola charitably calls \u201ctreadmill fodder\u201d (aka, something too violent, too macho, or just too inane to occupy us on a weekend evening \u2013 but suitable for David to wile away his time on the \u2018mill\u2019). Rick and Liam (two of my favourite ironists), after lauding or lacerating the video candidate (whichever is appropriate), will offer a \u2018score\u2019 as it were (somewhere between 0 and 4 stars), reflecting the global merit of the particular offering.<\/p>\n

It shouldn\u2019t come as much of a surprise that \u20184\u2019s\u2019 are relatively hard to come by; equally (believe it or not, given the parade of mindless \u2018mill fodder\u2019 that seems to fill the big screen) \u20180\u2019s\u2019 don\u2019t show up too terribly often either! Most ratings are in the 2 to 2 \u00bd range, indicating a product of interest, but with significant shortcomings, indulgences (gratuitous gore), irrelevancies, or just plain bad acting to make it a struggle on some level for our erudite judges to sit through \u2013 without engaging their finely honed senses of humour.<\/p>\n

What binds these seemingly quite unrelated experiences are two elements: a) the use of some kind of mechanism for \u2018scoring\u2019 as it were; and b) the (somewhat unexpected) attention that must be paid to meaningfully<\/em> \u2018rate\u2019 one\u2019s response. As one who has, in one way or another, spent a large part of his working life in the realm of \u2018ratings\u2019 and the (sometimes fruitless) attempt to have people take this exercise sufficiently seriously to enable me to draw conclusions about their personality, intellect, pain levels, and career aspirations from pages of blackened-in bubbles on the response sheets of questionnaires, this resonated indeed. Years of being called upon to quantify the subjective, to supply a number to a definition, a writing sample, a partially recalled design, to rate a mood, or to score someone\u2019s \u2018global functioning\u2019 (\u201cplease consider the following on a hypothetical continuum of \u2026\u201d) can\u2019t help but endear one to the sheer simplicity and reductionist thinking embraced by a lovely, linear, Likert scale. The kind that\u2019s anchored by a \u2018strongly something\u2019 at one end (often the equivalent of a \u2018+2\u2019) and a \u2018strongly not something\u2019 (\u2018-2\u2019) at the other. Do I hear Ebel\u2019s \u201ctwo thumbs\u201d echoing in the background?<\/p>\n

Now I am not so na\u00efve as to assume that everyone attends with rapt focus to a homily from beginning to end. But I have observed that sometimes my attention is captured; and sometimes, let\u2019s just say, less so. Sometimes the Sunday morning efforts are an \u201cEnglish Patient\u201d, or a \u201cSchindler\u2019s List\u201d; and sometimes, let\u2019s just say a \u201cDeath Race 2000\u201d. And, as with any good screen play, script, or text, one looks for the requisite component pieces: the inclusion of timely scripture (a premise), the delivery (the acting), the integrity (does it wander, does it hang together), the climax (does it consolidate), the sidebars (the self-indulgences), and the resonance (does it touch, connect). And, sad to say, mere popularity, sentimentality, familiarity, as with the movies, sell tickets but may be, what shall we call them, \u2018box-office successes\u2019, but critical failures. (For fun, I\u2019ve correlated \u2013 another psychologist\u2019s \u2018trick\u2019 \u2013 dollars of ticket sales with the G & M\u2019s \u2018star\u2019 scores. Not good.)<\/p>\n

And so was born a little device, a context, a rating scale that, for me both fosters critical listening and<\/em> invites a serious, considered evaluation of a weekly (hopefully) event that has as its structure and intent a pulling together of liturgy, church calendar, scripture, proffered guidance, spiritual stimulation, and reflection. How could we afford this less importance than the relentless \u201cOn a scale of \u2026 could you please rate your enjoyment of the themes explored in this week\u2019s episode of Becoming Jessica or Being Veronica or . . ?\u201d<\/div>\n

<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
David Howard<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s hard to escape them. The phone rings, typically as the family gathers round the dinner table; and then the query: \u201cCan I have a few minutes of your time?\u201d We all have strategies (some passive, some not so) for dealing with the ubiquity of telemarketing and its blood-brother, the telesurvey. Nicola\u2019s personal favourite is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidhowardpsychologist.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidhowardpsychologist.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidhowardpsychologist.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidhowardpsychologist.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidhowardpsychologist.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=97"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidhowardpsychologist.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidhowardpsychologist.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=97"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidhowardpsychologist.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=97"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidhowardpsychologist.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=97"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}