What it’s for
A Rating question asks the respondent to place themselves on a scale — “very satisfied” to “very dissatisfied”, “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree”, or 1 to 5. On the phone, a rating is asked exactly like a Single choice question: the scale points are the answer options, the interviewer reads them after the prompt, and the respondent picks one. Every setting, every piece of call behaviour and every recorded variable is the same as Single choice. The differences are in how you author the scale and how numeric answers are reported.Rating or Single choice?
Settings
A Rating question has the same settings as Single choice — see Single choice for each one:
Plus the shared settings in Question settings.
Authoring the scale
Word scales. Enter each point as an option, in order: Very satisfied, Satisfied, Neither satisfied nor dissatisfied, Dissatisfied, Very dissatisfied. Use Accept for the everyday ways people say each point — pretty happy for Satisfied, not fussed either way for the midpoint. Number scales. Enter the points as numbers — 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 — and say what the ends mean in the prompt: “On a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 is very poor and 5 is excellent, how would you rate …?” Add Accept lines for number words where it helps (five out of five, top marks). Don’t know and refused. Add Don’t know and Prefer not to say as Volunteered only options so they’re recorded as answers rather than skipped — they’re not read out as part of the scale. Lead-in. A lead-in such as “Would you say:” makes a word scale sound natural. On a number scale described in the prompt, you may prefer “Is it:” or a short “From 1 to 5:”. Context. Tell the matcher how to treat in-between answers in Context for the matcher — for example “‘Somewhere between satisfied and very satisfied’ is Satisfied; ‘three and a half’ is 3.”What the respondent hears
Exactly as for Single choice: the prompt, the lead-in and the scale; the scale again on request without using an attempt; a “did you say…?” check on a possible mishearing; one nudge on “don’t know” and on a refusal; and a skip when the attempts run out. See Single choice → What the respondent hears. A scale point that is a number is read back as digits — “Did you say 4?”What is recorded
In Results and the CSV export, a scale point written as a number (such as
4) is stored as a number, so it can be averaged when you analyse the export. A word scale point is stored as text. See Results and Responses and export.
Next Steps
- Single choice — every setting in detail.
- Battery (grid) — several items on one scale.
- Number — for 0–10 scores.