Something to think about: There was a significant "imbalance" in the coverage of candidates' "traits or characteristics" versus the nation's economy in the 2016 election, according to University of California political science professor Lynn Vavreck.
"So more coverage of phenotypic traits… and with this more coverage we are having more scope to select the next cycle of this seed.
Only Kansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee were judged as having Adequate coverage of complex trait genetics concepts (unpublished data).
The VSQ with four response categories demonstrated almost comparable coverage of the trait as the five-category format of the VAQ, but demonstrated highly uneven categories (Table 3).
The VSQ with eight categories (VSQ V2 and V3) also had large coverage of the trait with even categories (SD, 0.50) (Table 4).
Compared to "difficulty" ratings, items rating "frequency" were limited by either a narrow coverage of the trait or unequal width of the categories which might lead to poor differentiation between respondents.
Larger scale ranges result in greater measurement coverage of the latent trait.
For difficulty rating, increasing the number of categories did not always provide a larger coverage of the latent trait and often introduced unevenness of the categories (Table 3).
Moreover, there is evidence that increasing the number of categories does not always provide a larger coverage of the target trait, and they concluded that rating scales with fewer response categories were more functional [ 47].
Khadka et al. [ 61] examined the characteristics of functional ratings scales in a sample of adult participants on a surgical waiting list, and found that items with simple and uniform question formats and four or five labeled categories demonstrated functionality, hierarchical ordering and good coverage of the latent trait under measurement.
