The Semantic Scale Network

At the Summer Institute for Computational Social Science, we developed a method to quantify overlap of psychological scales (e.g., scales for happiness vs. scales for well-being).

Rather than relying on correlating participant answers, this method quantifies the closeness of different scales by analyzing latent similarities in the scales’ items/questions.

The result is an online application that researchers can use to prevent the publication of redundant scales, which is a big problem in psychology.

Open access publication in Psychological Methods

The application can be accessed here.

A glimpse of the Semantic Scale Network is depicted below.