Dual scaling of rating data

Abstract

When applied to contingency tables, dual scaling and correspondence are mathematically equivalent methods. For the analysis of rating data, however, the methods differ. To a large extent this is due to differences in preprocessing of the data. In particular, in dual scaling, ratings are either transformed to rank order, or to successive category data before applying a customised dual scaling approach. In correspondence analysis, on the other hand, a so-called doubling of the original ratings is applied before applying the usual correspondence analysis formulas. In this paper, we consider these differences in detail. We propose a dual scaling variant that can be applied directly to the ratings and we compare theoretical as well as practical properties of the different approaches.