Guttman Scale

Guttman scaling is a methodology for constructing unidimensional scales with a cumulative property, developed by Louis Guttman in 1944. The method assumes that items form a perfect or near-perfect hierarchy: if a respondent endorses a harder item, they must endorse all easier items below it. This creates a reproducible scale structure useful for measuring constructs with ordinal properties such as difficulty, intensity, or severity.