Feeling Thermometer

The feeling thermometer is a common survey tool used by researchers to determine and compare respondents' feelings about a given person, group, or issue. Feeling thermometers enable respondents to express their attitudes about a person, group, or issue by applying a numeric rating of their feelings toward that person, group, or issue to an imaginary scale. Using a feeling thermometer, respondents express their feelings in terms of degrees, with their attitudes corresponding to temperatures. A rating of 0, very cold, indicates that a respondent does not like a given person, group, or issue at all; a rating of 100, very warm, translates to the respondent liking that person, group, or issue very much. In general, researchers consider ratings below 50 to indicate a respondent dislikes or has a negative view of a person, group, or issue; conversely, respondent ratings above 50 are indicative of positively held feelings or attitudes. The midpoint of the feeling thermometer, 50, is reserved to indicate that a respondent's feelings toward a person, group, or issue are completely neutral: He or she does not like or dislike, approve or disapprove, have positive or negative feelings toward the person, group, or issue.

Despite the seemingly simple and straightforward concept of feeling thermometers, they are susceptible to high levels of variance due to a variety of reasons associated with how individuals respond to feeling thermometers. Studies have found that some respondents tend to be “warmer” than others in applying the scale, whereas other respondents tend to be “colder.” Further, they explain that some respondents, for whatever reason, restrict their ratings to relatively small portions of the thermometer, whereas others are just more open to using the entire spectrum. Additionally, an inverse relationship has been found between respondents' levels of education and thermometer ratings, with higher ratings associated with the less educated respondents.

Feeling thermometers were first used in the 1964 American National Election Study. Because feeling thermometers were introduced in an election study, people commonly associate the use of feeling thermometers with political science research. Although political scientists do utilize feeling thermometers in a wide variety of studies, many researchers in other disciplines, including psychology and sociology, frequently employ feeling thermometers in their research as well. Beyond social sciences, feeling thermometers are often used in medical fields to allow respondents, or patients, to rate their health or health-related quality of life.

Feeling thermometers are important survey instruments because they allow researchers to gather information about the direction, as well as the intensity, of respondents' attitudes and feelings toward specific people, groups, and issues. Additionally, feeling thermometers have proven to be indispensable in longitudinal studies such as the American National Election Study because they allow researchers to observe and document how peoples' feelings and attitudes about certain public figures, groups, or issues change over time.