Is a Ratio Scale Assumption for Physician Ratings Justified? Comment on “What Patients Value in Physicians: Analyzing Drivers of Patient Satisfaction Using Physician-Rating Website Data”

In a paper published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, Bidmon et al [1] investigated the relationships between 24 attributes of the service provided by physicians and 4 features of patient satisfaction with these physicians. The service attributes were assessed via 4-category rating scales coded from 1 for “strongly disagree” to 4 for “strongly agree” and the satisfaction features via 5-category rating scales from 1 for “bad” to 5 for “excellent.” The latter measures were rescaled to range from 1 to 4.