Some of the ‘best practice’ approaches to ensuring reproducibility of research can be difficult to implement in the developmental and clinical domains, where sample sizes and session lengths are constrained by the practicalities of recruitment and testing. For this reason, an important area of improvement to target is the reliability of measurement. Here we demonstrate that best–worst scaling (BWS) provides a superior alternative to Likert ratings for measuring children’s subjective impressions. Seventy-three children aged 5–6 years rated the trustworthiness of faces using either Likert ratings or BWS over two sessions. Individual children’s ratings in the BWS condition were significantly more consistent from session 1 to session 2 than those in the Likert condition, a finding we also replicate with a large adult sample (N = 72). BWS also produced more reliable ratings at the group level than Likert ratings in the child sample. These findings indicate that BWS is a developmentally appropriate response format that can deliver substantial improvements in reliability of measurement, which can increase our confidence in the robustness of findings with children.

一些确保研究可重复性的“最佳实践”方法可能难以在发育和临床领域实施，其中样本量和会话长度受到招募和测试实用性的限制。出于这个原因，目标改进的一个重要领域是测量的可靠性。在这里，我们证明了最佳-最差量表 (BWS) 为衡量儿童的主观印象提供了一种优于李克特评级的替代方法。73 名 5-6 岁的儿童使用李克特评分或 BWS 在两个会话中对面孔的可信度进行评分。BWS 条件下个别儿童的评分从第 1 阶段到第 2 阶段明显比李克特条件下的更一致，我们也用大型成人样本 (N = 72) 复制了这一发现。与儿童样本中的李克特评级相比，BWS 在小组层面也产生了更可靠的评级。这些研究结果表明，BWS 是一种适合发育的响应格式，可以显着提高测量的可靠性，这可以增加我们对儿童研究结果稳健性的信心。