| Mon, 20 Jun 2011
Star ratings revisitedJust over a year ago I started awarding books and things that I reviewed shiny gold stars. I also retrospectively scattered stars on some of my older reviews. I thought it would be a good idea to see how many of each I'm awarding, and so how well I'm sticking to my rating system. I'm expecting a normal distribution, with the mean somewhat above 3 stars to reflect the fact that I deliberately don't read shite, and that lots of what I read is because other people have raved about it. Well, the results are in ...
I think this is good. It's roughly what I'd expect given my reviewing criteria and the small number of options available. If I had a larger scale to work with - if, say, I was awarding marks out of 20 - I'd expect a smoother drop-off, and at both ends instead of just at the bottom end. Consider the pathological cases of the difference between scoring 54 and scoring 55 on a scale of 0 to 100, and the difference between scoring 0 and 1 (or bad and good) on a scale with just two possibilities. There's a happy medium somewhere, but I'm buggered if I know what it is. There's probably actual scientific research about this in some statistical journal (and fluffy hand-wavey crap about it in marketing and social science journals). I can see it being terribly important in designing questionnaires. Posted by David Cantrell on Wed, 6 Jul 2011 at 01:05:47 Sorry, this post is too old for you to comment on it.
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Posted by Ruth on Tue, 5 Jul 2011 at 22:03:31