Rewording and Reworking 8Values From The Ground Up

[JoshuaKimsey]

So I have been thinking of some ways to help improve the quality of the test and solve some commonly seen complains about it.

Firstly is the perceived bias many say they see in the test. Most individuals I've heard criticism from complain of a left-leaning bias in the test. I struggled to find a way to easily quantify this supposed bias, until I found a rather simple, yet elegant solution. Clicking the same answer on each question, for example "Strongly Agree", the final results should roughly even out to be 50/50 in each category, or lose to it. This is because in a properly balanced test, a survey topic should be approached by asking two questions. Each question is the opposite of the other, meaning that if answered the same way, the results would cancel out to a net-zero change in the final results for the survey. This is an easy way to tell what bias a survey might have, and how badly it is skewed in one direction or another. As an example, I used this method on the Political Compass test and you can see the results below: As you can see, the economic axis of the graph came out to be exactly 0, but the authoritarian/libertarian axis has an obvious, and rather large, skew towards the libertarian end of the compass.

Following this procedure, I used this method on the 8Values test, selecting "Strongly agree" too all questions, and you can see the results below: You can see that the diplomatic axis is decently balanced, at only a little over 1 percentage point difference. The societal axis, though a few percentage points, is within what I would consider to be an acceptable margin or error. The Economic and Civil axises though are far beyond what a margin of error should cause. It's obvious that there is an imbalance of questions for those two parts that leads to a very large, 20 point gap total between the two sides of each axis. (Please note that selecting all "Strong Disagree" to the questions will result in a mirror opposite of the results shown above, with the same numbers being reversed on the axis scales.)

So firstly, we need to go back and we work the questions to include two for each basic idea being asked, each having an opposite view from the other. For example, one question could be, "I support single-payer, universal healthcare" while the second one could be "I do not support government welfare for medical needs". This suits the opposing view for the same topic, and also insure that people who fall below the "Universal healthcare", but above "No Welfare" have an option to click. This also means that there will always need to be an even number of questions in the test, though I don't see why that should be an issue.

Secondly, we need to get rid of questions that contain double negatives. Double negatives might be ok in grammar, but in a survey they will lead to confusion about what option to pick. For example, instead of saying, "No authority should be left unquestioned", say, "All authority should be questioned", as was mentioned in another issue thread #64

Finally, I think one other thing that would go a long way towards helping to ease fears of bias is to have the questions be randomized each time a user takes the test. This shouldn't be too terribly hard to achieve with just some JavaScript, an Array, and a random number generator. This would help make the test less predictable and more unique each time someone takes it.

These are just a few of my suggestions to help make the 8Values test truly great! Let me know what y'all think of these suggestions, or if you have any additions to add to them! :smiley: