Standard MaxDiff Scores

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The "Scores" tab reports the average scores for the items across respondents. Also, the 95% confidence interval for each is displayed.

 

Rescaled Scores: These are "Probabilities of Choice" (described below) that have been rescaled to sum to 100 for each respondent. These data reflect a ratio-quality scale, allowing one to conclude (for example) that an item with a score of 10 is twice as important/preferred as an item with a score of 5.

 

Probability of Choice: These are probabilities (ranging from 0 to 100) that reflect the likelihood that an item would be selected as "best" among a representative set of items in the MaxDiff questionnaire. For example, if you showed 5 items per set, the Probability of Choice for an item is the average likelihood that respondents would select this item as "best" when compared to 4 other items of average importance/preference (among those included in the questionnaire). These data reflect a ratio-quality scale.

 

Raw Scores: These are the scores directly resulting from the HB estimation and are logit-scaled (an interval-quality scale). These scores are zero-centered within each respondent, so their average is zero.  Interval-quality scales do not allow us to make ratio-quality judgments, such as saying that an item with a raw score of 2 is twice as important/preferred as an item with a score of 1.

 

The 95% confidence interval provides an indication of how much certainty we have regarding our estimate of the item's score. The interpretation is this: if we were to repeat the experiment many, many times (drawing new random sample in each case), the population's true mean would fall within the computed confidence interval in 95% of the experiments. In other words, we are 95% confident that the true mean for the population falls within the 95% confidence interval (again, assuming unbiased, random samples). The 95% confidence interval is computed by taking the item's mean, plus or minus 1.96 times its standard error. The standard error for each score is computed by dividing its standard deviation by the square root of the sample size.