Semantic Differential Scale is a survey or questionnaire rating scale that asks people to rate a product, company, brand or any "entity" within the frames of a multi-point rating options. These survey answering options are grammatically on opposite adjectives at each end. For example, love / hate, satisfied / unsatisfied and likely to return / unlikely to return with intermediate options in between.
Surveys or questionnaires using Semantic Differential Scale is the most reliable way to get information on people’s emotional attitude towards a topic of interest.
Charles Egerton Osgood, a famous American psychologist, invented the semantic differential scale so that this “connotative meaning” of emotional attitude towards entities can be recorded and put to good use.
This research was conducted on a large database and Osgood found that there are 3 scales that were commonly effective, irrespective of race or culture or difference in language:
A wide variation of subjects can be measured using these combinations like customers’ outlook about an upcoming product launch or employee satisfaction.
The ease-of-understanding and the popularity it comes with it, makes it extremely reliable. Due to the versatility that these survey questions come with, make the data collected very accurate.
Semantic differential scale questions are used to ask respondents to rate your products, organization or services with multi-point questions with polar adjectives at the extremes of this scale like likely/ unlikely, happy/sad, loved the service/ hated the service.
Questions that feature a graphical slider give the respondent a more interactive way to answer the semantic differential scale question.
The non-slider question uses typical radio buttons for a more traditional survey look and feel that people are more used to answering.
These questions give ample freedom to the users to express their emotions about your organization, products or services.
The ordering questions offer the scope to rate the parameters that the respondents feel are best or worst according to their personal experiences.
The most easy and eye catchy semantic differential scale questions are the satisfaction rating questions.
QuestionPro provides you with the necessary resources to collecting all types of various data. When seeking an alternative solution provider though, consider the following:
Signing up with QuestionPro gives you access to over 100 different templates to use for distribution, editing or simply brainstorming new ideas. Customize the questions, question types, order and color to fit your exact needs.
When you're done creating your survey, you can distribute it via email, direct link or embedding HTML code on your website or blog. You can view a snapshot report, in real-time, of your current responses.
After the survey is finished and you're done collecting responses, you can view detailed reports with customization at your fingertips. You can apply filters, work with pivot tables and view trend analysis.