Ranking the Ratings : A Latent-Class Regression Model to Control for Overall Agreement in Opinion Research

When rating questions are used to measure attitudes or values in survey research a researcher might want to control for the effect of overall agreement with the set of items that is rated. The need for controlling for overall agreement arises when the set of items refers to conceptual opposite perspectives, when balanced sets of items are used, or when a researcher is interested in relative preferences rather than overall agreement. In this paper, we introduce a method for filtering out overall agreement when a researcher's aim is to construct a latent class typology of respondents, that is, a latent-class ordinal regression model with random intercept. With this approach segments in the population are identified that differ in their relative preference of particular items over other items in the set. Examples are given on the concepts of locus of control, gender role attitudes and civil morality. The examples demonstrate that when an overall agreement is present in the data, the method is able to detect it, and at the same time allows identifying latent classes of respondents that differ in their relative preference of the items being rated