IA Institute Releases First of Two 2009 IA Progress Grant Studies

August 20, 2010 12:17 AM

The IA Institute is proud to release the first of two studies from our 2009 IA Progress grant program.

Neha Modgil of Mumbai, India was one of the 2009 grant winners. Neha's paper, "Emotional Scale" - Measuring User Feedback in Rural India, explores some of the drawbacks of Likert Scale, a widely used statistical tool for measuring attitudes, emotions, opinions and feelings.

From the Abstract:

"It is observed consistently and extensively by social researchers that Likert scale is not understood uniformly by various people across various regions of the world. Major reasons being levels of literacy and education, differences in perception of the terminology (good, very good, bad, very bad), avoidance of giving extreme responses (tendency to give safer responses than the genuine responses owing to social desirability).

"This study attempts to gather responses on Culture specific scale which is devised as an alternate to the regular Likert scale, in rural and semi-urban India. It further attempts to provide a possible solution to the problem."

Download Neha's paper on "Emotional Scale" - Measuring User Feedback in Rural India.

Javier Velasco-Martin of Chapel Hill, North Carolina was our second grant recipient for his proposal, Exploring Intimate Self Exposure in Social Media..

Since Javier's study is part of his PhD project, we anticipate that his paper will take a bit longer to release, as it conforms to the University of North Carolina academic schedule. We will announce an opportunity for the IA Institute community to participate in the study. Please look for an announcement in late Summer 2010.