Self-report scales are used in abundance across several different professional areas. It is important to understand how wording, anchors, and formats can affect final results. In addition, short forms of scales are important for use in busy clinical and medical settings. Our experiment tested two different short anxiety scale formats in order to determine if responses would vary, and whether they would correlate with longer anxiety scale versions. For this study, we chose a Likert 10-point scale and a Visual Analogue scale represented by a line with beginning and end anchors. Our results did not support our hypothesis that we would find a difference in anxiety scores between the two scale formats. However, we did find order interaction effects such that when people responded to the number, they scored higher if they saw that version first before the line version. Finally, both short scales correlated with a longer version. Although both scale types can be used in gathering data, we did find that the Likert scale was easier to score and left less possibility of researcher error.
