Replication data for Measuring Emotional Response: Comparing Alternative Approaches to Measurement

Scholarly interest in the role of emotion in accounting for how people react to political figures, events, and messages has escalated over the past two plus decades in political science and psychology. However, research on the validity of the measurement of subjective self-report of emotional responses is rather limited. We introduce here a new measurement approach, a “slider” format and compare it to the long used “radio button” item format. We assess the reliability and validity of these two approaches to the measurement of affect. The study examines self-report measures of emotion to three generated news stories about terrorist threats. We report that both measurement formats are each able to extract the expected three-fold affect structure from a ten affect word battery. The slider format is, however, modestly more reliable, and more efficient in time to complete, has the ability to limit missing data, and generates continuous data that is less truncated than data derived from the radio button format. Finally, we report on three tests of construct validity. Both approaches exhibit equivalent results on two of those tests. However, the radio button format does poorly on one test of construct validity, that on the anticipated relationship between anxiety and interest in novel information.