IntervalQuestionStat

Tools to Deal with Interval-Valued Responses in Questionnaires

Description

IntervalQuestionStat is an open source package for doing the statistical analysis of interval-valued responses collected through interval-valued scales in lots of different widely used questionnaires measuring many intrinsically imprecise human attributes in R environment. In particular, this package implements the theoretical concepts, results, and ideas suggested by the SMIRE+CoDiRE (Statistical Methods with Imprecise Random Elements and Comparison of Distributions of Random Elements) Research Group (https://bellman.ciencias.uniovi.es/smire+codire/) from the University of Oviedo (Spain) taking into account some applied investigations and real-life studies.

In Social and Educational Sciences and many other disciplines, interval-valued scales arise as a strong alternative to both traditional Likert-type or visual analogue scales in some questionnaires measuring people’s behavior (attitudes, opinions, perceptions, feelings, etc.). This type of data can not be directly measured because it concerns inherently imprecise features. Likert-type and visual analogue scales force respondents to choose single-point answers linked to some items (statements or questions), so individual differences are almost systematically overlooked. In order to overcome the limitations of these scales in capturing uncertainty over respondents’ answers, interval-valued scales allow them to select a real-valued interval and not being constrained to a single point.

This package provides S4 classes, methods, and functions for doing the statistical analysis of interval-valued responses in questionnaires measuring imprecise traits from both descriptive an inferential points of view. In particular, it aims to provide the the following functionality:

• Definition of interval-valued data objects and instances.
• Calculation of basic operations with interval-valued data.
• Calculation of some central tendency and variation measures.
• Visualization of interval-valued data.
• Association of interval-valued responses and Likert-type or visual analogue answers
• Statistical analysis of reliability of questionnaire’s responses.
• Simulation of interval-valued responses in questionnaires.

Finally, it should also be remarked that the IntervalQuestionStat package includes some real-life data sets.

Authors

José García-García, with contributions from María Asunción Lubiano.

Installation

To install the IntervalQuestionStat package in R environment please use:

# Install from CRAN
install.packages("IntervalQuestionStat")

# Or the development version from GitHub
# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("garciagarjose/IntervalQuestionStat")

Citation

To cite the IntervalQuestionStat package in publications please use:

“García-García, J. (2022). IntervalQuestionStat: Tools to Deal with Interval-Valued Responses in Questionnaires. R package version 0.2.0. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=IntervalQuestionStat.”

A BibTeX entry for LaTeX users is:

@Manual{IntervalQuestionStatPkgR,
    title = {IntervalQuestionStat: Tools to Deal with Interval-Valued Responses
             in Questionnaires},
    author = {Jos{\'e} Garc{\'i}a-Garc{\'i}a},
    year = {2022},
    note = {R package version 0.2.0},
  }

See also

For further information please visit the SMIRE+CoDiRE (Statistical Methods with Imprecise Random Elements and Comparison of Distributions of Random Elements) Research Group’s webpage at https://bellman.ciencias.uniovi.es/smire+codire/