Response categories in health- related questionnaires: adverb of degree and adverb of time

Different people respond to a question differently. But do they value the same when they choose a response category to respond to a given question. For instance when they choose ‘excellent’ do they have the same evaluation in their mind. This study aimed to investigate people’s evaluations of different response categories usually used in health-related questionnaires.
A population-based study was conducted in Tehran, Iran. A representative sample of adults aged 18 to 65 years were entered into the study and were asked to respond to a questionnaire. The questionnaire contained different visual analogue scales (from 0 to 10 with 0 being at lowest and 10 at highest extreme) in order to evaluate different verbal response categories presented in different types of adverbs
In all 1109 respondents completed the questionnaire. The mean age of participants was 34.36 (SD = 11.82) and they were relatively well educated (mean formal education = 11.99, SD = 3.93 years). The analysis of the data indicated that in most instances the participants showed almost similar evaluations for adverb of degree (sometimes also referred to as adverb of quantity). For ‘very much’ the mean point was 8.35 (SD = 1.09) while for ‘much’ it was 7.10 (SD = 1.22). When respondents were asked to indicate the values for adverb of time (sometimes also referred to as adverb of frequency) , it was found that the mean value for ‘always’ was 8.99 (SD = 1.46), whereas for ‘often’ it was 6.65 (SD = 1.69), and for ‘not at all’ it was 0.25 (SD = 0.65). The most important finding was the fact that there were no significant differences in people’s responses with regards to age, gender, education, marital and employment status.
Overall, the findings showed promising results indicating that people had almost similar evaluations of response categories when responding to a questionnaire. The findings suggest since people perceive similar meaning for verbal response categories it is safe to ask people to rate different response categories and then report aggregate results as statistical figures such as percentage or mean scores