Grammatical Redundancy in Scales

By
  • Alisha Gupta ,
  • Leah Alley ,
  • Imran Kadolkar ,
  • Jose M. Cortina ,
  • Kurt P. Winsler

The purpose of this paper is to provide scale developers (and shorteners) with a process for quantifying, identifying, and reducing grammatical redundancy without compromising conceptual redundancy, a process that we label ConGRe. 

As theoretical models become more complex, there is more pressure to use less time-consuming methods generally, and shorter scales specifically. Although reliability is related to scale length, reliability cutoffs are easily met, even in very short scales, by writing or selecting items that are worded in nearly identical ways, that is, grammatical redundancy. However, grammatical redundancy increases reliability at the cost of domain sampling—a crucial early step in scale construction and one of the two pillars of content validity. Without it, a scale cannot capture the intended construct. Our ConGRe process involves indices from the linguistics literature that can be used to guide decisions during item writing, that is, prior to data collection. We examine their relation to more traditional psychometric indicators and provide a set of benchmarks. Overall, we demonstrate that it is possible to reduce grammatical redundancy, thus avoiding scale deficiency, without sacrificing traditional psychometric properties.This will allow investigators to modify scale content and item wording so that unnecessary redundancy is minimized and, by extension, the degree to which the construct of interest is captured is enhanced.

The paper is organized as follows: First by explaining the notion of grammatical redundancy, describing the problems that it creates, and distinguishing it from conceptual redundancy. Next, a variety of examples in order to illustrate grammatical redundancy and the problems that it poses. The rest of the paper is devoted to development and illustration of a process, ConGRe, which allows one to create a scale (even a relatively short one) that maintains conceptual redundancy without reverting to grammatical redundancy, thus achieving adequate coverage of the content domain.