Editor’s note: A U.S. Department of Commerce report, "Approaches to Developing Questionnaires, " includes a section on the results of study testing a seven-point rating scale and a ten-point rating scale using the split sample technique. A summarized excerpt from this section appears below.

The Income Survey Development Program (ISDP) was established in 1976 to develop and test procedures to improve survey data on income, on participation in government aid programs, and economic well-being. Because of known measurement problems and because results were to be used in a series of national panel studies, the testing phase was considerably more extensive than is usual for household surveys. The program was jointly sponsored by the Department of Health and Human Services and the Bureau of the Census.

The ISDP Research Panel included a number of split sample and other tests. A single example—a test of two alternative subjective measures of well-being—is described here. This example was chosen because its straight-forward field procedures are easily transferable to many survey situations and because the evaluation incorporated several common techniques.

Attitudinal measures originally developed and tested by Andrews and Withey had been used in earlier ISDP field tests. The items asked respondents to rate their life as a whole, their personal economic situation and, for those with children, their income in terms of providing for their children. The items were designed to provide an additional means of evaluating the impact of government aid programs and to assess overall economic well-being.

Previously, respondents answered by choosing one of seven labeled categories as shown in the left panel of Figure 1. Results using these seven "delighted-to-terrible" categories showed that reported attitudes have a strong positive skew, with most responses clustering on the "delighted" end of the scale. Empirical...