What is the Thurstone Scale? Definition and examples

The Thurstone scale can help you accurately measure a respondent's attitude or sentiments. This article explains the Thurstone method, how to apply it, and when to use it.

The Thurstone scale is a rating scale that gauges a respondent’s behavior, feelings, or attitude about a subject. It poses a series of weighted statements to respondents to determine how strongly they feel about a topic. Unlike numeric scales, which ask people to answer based on a series of numerical values, participants can only respond to these statements with “agree” or “disagree.” 

For example, if an employer wanted to measure the effectiveness of their onboarding program, they might include a statement like in a post-onboarding survey: I understand the responsibilities and expectations of my role. When using the Thurston scale, respondents can indicate their preparedness by responding with "agree" or "disagree."

Psychologist Louis Leon Thurstone first developed the scale by asking respondents to agree or disagree with a series of related statements he considered positive, negative, or neutral. He calculated his participants’ attitudes by assigning numerical weights to each statement.

Imagine a company using surveys to better understand consumers’ attitudes about multiple green energy solutions.

They could use the Thurstone scale to determine each respondent's feelings about electric cars. When designing the survey, they'll need to assign a numerical weight to each statement to understand how strongly respondents feel.

For example, the company might include two different statements in their survey: 

However, the first question could be weighed at a 2 and the second at a 4, indicating a difference in the intensity of their feelings.

The company might include similar statements, such as: 

In a similar vein, researchers could also use the Thurstone scale to understand consumers' sentiments about recycling. To understand how respondents feel about recycling, they might include statements like:

Each question would be weighted numerically to determine how strongly respondents feel.

Researchers use the Thurstone scale to measure and compare respondents’ attitudes on a particular issue. You can use the Thurstone method to:

However, the Thurstone scale won’t suit every study. It can make measuring nuance more difficult because it only offers two answer choices. If you need to track sentiments more closely, consider using a different rating scale.

Many scales used to measure attitude are ordinal, meaning they rank questions in a specific order. But, the differences between the ranks are not necessarily equal or measurable. For example, with a Guttman scale, respondents answer “yes” or “no” to questions ranked in a hierarchical order that represents an increasingly extreme position on an issue. 

Like the Likert scale, the Thurstone scale can help researchers understand attitudes. But while the Likert scale offers a range of agree/disagree options, the Thurston scale only provides two. 

For example, a retailer may send a customer a short survey to understand their feelings about a recent visit to their store. If using the Likert scale, the survey would pose a statement: “I was satisfied with my visit today.” 

Respondents could select an answer from an agree/disagree scale (e.g., strongly agree, somewhat agree, neither agree nor disagree, somewhat disagree, or strongly disagree).

If using the Thurstone method, the respondent would only have two answer options: agree or disagree. 

Likert scale questions are popular with researchers because of their simplicity and versatility. They allow straightforward interpretation and understanding of attitudes, opinions, and perceptions.

They’re also considered more flexible than Thurston scale questions because researchers can use different numbered rating scales (though five-point and seven-point scales are most common.) 

Related reading: Using the Guttman scale in surveys

The Thurstone scale uses weighted "agree" and "disagree" options for simplicity and clarity. Weighted answers highlight the strength of respondents’ feelings, making it easier for researchers to analyze attitudes on specific topics.

Here’s how to create your own survey using the Thurston scale: 

Start by setting a survey goal or pick a specific topic to focus on. You'll use your survey to collect and analyze participants' sentiments on your selected topic.

Your Thurstone scale should be relevant to your goal or topic, so you'll need to determine this before building your weighting system.

For the Thurstone method, you’ll want to create a series of agree/disagree statements about the topic you’re studying. 

These statements should cover positive, negative, and neutral attitudes. The more statements you generate, the better and more valuable your survey data will be. 

When adding statements to your SurveyMonkey survey, use the multiple choice single answer question type and enable quiz mode by selecting the “Score this question (enable quiz mode)” checkbox at the bottom of the panel.

Alternatively, you can choose from our pre-written market research survey templates and reframe the questions as agree/disagree statements. 

Related: Survey question types explained: Examples and expert tips

Assign each statement a score between one and eleven. Statement weighting is essential to the Thurstone method because it allows you to quantify the intensity or extremity of your respondents’ attitudes. 

Decide the specific weight of each statement based on how supportive or not that statement is of the focus topic. A higher score typically indicates a more supportive position, while a lower score indicates a more neutral or disagreeable position.

For example, suppose you were surveying consumers’ attitudes towards recycling. In that case, you might include statements like:

You can assign weighting to statements yourself, but the risk of bias is lower if you get consensus from a study group.

If you were weighing these statements personally, you could score the first statement higher (at seven or more) due to its strong support of recycling. However, the second statement could be weighted lower (five or six) due to its neutral stance on recycling. The last statement could be weighed even lower (less than five) due to its negative attitude toward recycling. 

Your scoring might look something like this:

When working with a study group, have participants score how positive they believe each statement is on a scale of one to eleven. Calculate the median weight for each statement.

When using the Thurstone method, you'll need to order statements by the score you gave them or their median weight. Questions with the lowest score should appear at the top of the survey, while questions with a higher score should appear at the bottom.

Let’s return to our example statements in step three. The order of your statements would appear like this:

Share your survey with your target audience. With the Thurstone method, each “disagree” response to a statement equals a zero. Every “agree” response equals the question’s weighted score. 

To determine sentiment, add the scores of each statement a respondent agreed with and divide the result by the total number of statements they responded to.

In our recycling example, a respondent disagreeing with statement one and agreeing with statements two and three would score a 4.6 overall:

Lower overall scores suggest more negative or unfavorable attitudes toward the topic, while higher scores suggest more positive or favorable attitudes. A 5.3 score suggests that this respondent may have a neutral sentiment toward recycling.

A respondent agreeing with all three statements would score an 6.3, highlighting a more positive feeling about recycling:

In SurveyMonkey Analyze, you can also evaluate and compare scores across individuals or groups (by their average scores).

The Thurstone scale is just one way to measure attitude. Overall, when you’re using rating scale questions, following these tips can help you get more reliable data:

The Thurstone scale can be an important tool for quickly measuring and comparing attitudes. 

Whatever method you use to determine sentiment, ensure you follow best practices. You can start with a customizable survey template or choose from the many pre-written questions in our Question Bank.