Guttman Scale

Guttman Scale

On a Guttman scale, respondents who endorse one statement also agree with milder statements pertinent to the same underlying continuum. Thus, if the examiner knows examinee’s most extreme endorsement on the continuum, it is possible to reconstruct the intermediate responses as well.
Guttman scale are produced by selecting items that far into an ordered sequence of examinee endorsement. Although the Guttman approach was originally devised to determine whether a set of attitude statements is unidimensional the technique has been used in many different kinds of tests. For example, beck used Guttman type scaling to produce the individual items of the beck depression inventory (BDi). Items from the BDI resemble the following;
 I occasionally feel sad or blue
 I often feel sad or blue
 I feel sad or blue
 I always feel sad and can’t stand it

Clients are asked to “check the statements from each group that you feel is most true about you”. A client who endorses an extreme alternative (e.g. “I always feel sad and I can’t stand it”) almost certainly agrees with the milder statements as well.