Semantic differential is a type of a rating scale designed to measure the connotative meaning of objects, events, and concepts or attitudes. It has been used for a variety of purposes ranging from predicting a political election to identifying changes in personality structure. Charles Osgood’s semantic differential was designed to measure the connotative meaning of concepts. The respondent is asked to choose where his or her position lies, on a scale between two bipolar words, or a range of words or numbers ranging across a bipolar position (for example, `Excellent’, `Good’, Adequate’, `Poor’, `Inadequate’; or from 5 (powerful) down to 1 (weak).

Semantic differentiation is a procedure that involves rather standard scaling practices and a variety of analytical methods. The critical attributes of a semantic differential seem to be bipolar adjectives on seven-point scales like the ones below. The concepts are selected according to the researcher’s interest. The scales may be specially constructed for a particular task or selected from existing sets by any of several criteria. Differences in the patterns of check marks on the scales are assumed to represent differences in meanings of the concepts judged and/or differences in groups of subjects judging the same concepts.

Applying the semantic differential to rate a blog or website

You can apply the semantic differential to rate our blog, Devcompage. Example: Would you say our blog (Devcompage) is:

Up-to-date ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ Obsolete
Well-organized ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ Cluttered
Attractive ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ Unattractive
Very useful ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ Very useless
Interactive ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ Static
Compelling ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ Unconvincing
Trustworthy ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ Doubtful
Reliable ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ Suspicious
Relevant ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ Irrelevant

If you can think of other attributes of an excellent blog that can be added to the rating scale above, please drop your comments to this post.

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