Although name Trikon reflects its owner’s triangularity, Glopnik sounds way better.
When I first started studying psychology, I believed that the labels attached to psychological scales are trustworthy. Under this impression, I employed the scales based on what their names claimed to measure. Little did I know the labels and the content of scales are not (directly) related. Since then I lost my belief in scale names and simply skip to the items to get at least some idea of what it might be measuring.
Jangle happens
Jingle-jangle fallacy has been raised so many times by this moment. To give a heads-up: jingle happens when you mistakenly buy an almond milk instead of a normal milk: both are named “milk” but have almost nothing to do with each other. Jangle happens when you order aubergine at a restaurant but they serve you eggplants—different names, same vegetable.
Imagine you are trying to test criterion validity of your new Eggplant scale using an allegedly different Aubergine scale. How frustrating it is to realize that it’s the same thing and your attempt to prove validity generally fails because of that.
New measurement instruments are normally developed in several steps beginning with a working definition of a construct. After that, normally, researchers generate stimuli/items, run trials and pilots, establish measurement properties and nomological networks, often adjusting the instrument at every step: dropping items, modifying response points, changing its factor structure, so that the content of the initial pool of items is represented only partly and sometimes reduced dramatically to a single, not central, aspect of the construct of interest. Nevertheless, a theoretical construct assigned to the scale—as well as its name—stays the same as at the initial stage, even if the initially stated construct doesn’t have much to do with an actual scale content. Things get worse when the researcher feels creative and instead of initial ‘boring’ scale label proposes something click-bait-y (e.g., “dirty dozen”, “fascism”, “imposterism” scale). Some researchers suggest their teachers’ and heroes’ names to label their scale, or start using their own name to distinguish their scale from the others. Regardless how noble or narcissistic their motivation is, the result is the same—looking solely at the scale’s name, it’s impossible to say what it measures .
I guess it’s not unique to scales, look at how people name their pets or even their very own children (Did you know there is a newborn in Kaliningrad, Russia whose first name is Putin? You might also heard of the former president of Ecuador who’s Lenín).
Quite often even decent informative scale names end up being acronyms which look more like Harry Potter spells (NEO-PI-R, HEXACO) or models of a deadly weapon (MMPI-2-RF, WASI-II).
What’s in a name?
But it doesn’t have to be this way. Names could and should be able to help finding and using measurement instruments.
Names are given to identify what things are (i.e., provide a shortcut of their nature) and what they are not (i.e., distinguish from the others). For example, my name is Maksim which points to the fact that I am not, e.g., John, and its weird spelling (with -ks- instead of -x-) identifies my origin from a Slavic-speaking country.
I suggest that scale naming should be based on the actual instrument’s content (as opposed to the initial idea, to what we planned to measure) and its distinguishing features (as opposed to marketing promise).
Imagine you started with an idea of a new flavour of right-wing-maga-conspiracy kind of a construct, but ended up with one factor and five items on prejudice against immigrants (e.g., “They’re eating the dogs”). It’s not a great idea to call it “MAGA scale” just because this title aligns with the initial idea and seems great for more attention and more citations. Such naming can only make the already pervasive jangle problem worse (remember eggplant?). So, following my own advice I would call it “anti-immigrant beliefs” and add something that makes it different from all the other (probably dozens of) similar scales, e.g., Anti-Immigrant Conspiracy Beliefs scale. On the other hand, I don’t want to duplicate the label, because it will cause a jingle issue (remember almond milk? uh, terrible). It’s likely that the naming issue will make me scan through the existing scales and I would conclude that such scale already exists. Yeah, wasted time, but at least we didn’t add to the jingle nor jangle.
A rose by certain name
The proliferation of poorly named measurement instruments isn’t just annoying—it actively hampers scientific progress. When researchers can’t efficiently locate appropriate scales or misunderstand what existing ones measure, we waste resources creating redundant tools and drawing faulty conclusions.
Scale names should function like good scientific labels: descriptive, distinctive, and honest about their content. Ideally, it should be a convention, an APA standard if you will.
So the next time you develop a measurement instrument, resist the urge to name it after yourself, your mentor, or the latest cultural reference. Instead, do the unglamorous but scientifically sound work of naming it precisely for what it measures. Your future colleagues—desperately searching databases for appropriate scales—will silently thank you.
1 Renaming existing scales is very tempting but I am afraid it can create even bigger mess.
2 I believe psychological scales may stick for a while despite all the rapid technological change, so the naming issue will keep being important.