The Likert-type scales are among the most widely implemented instruments in social sciences, nonetheless, it is not clear so far whether such scales should or should not employ a mid-point “neutral” response option. While a mid-point category might improve the psychometric properties of survey instruments when appropriately applied, it has been argued that respondents often tend to use it in several invalid ways. This study aims to examine how a neutral response modality may influence the scales’ psychometric properties. We conducted two types of survey experiments employing a between-subjects and a within-subjects design, comparing psychometric properties of twelve personality scales in both cases i.e., with and without the neutral response category. Our findings show that the scales presenting the neutral category allow to some extent for better psychometric characteristics, both in terms of their reliability and with respect to the proportion of accounted variance by the first factors. Results also suggest that most respondents seem to use the neutral category validly. However, there are also indications that a minority of respondents actually employ the neutral answer as an “escape” option, especially when asked socially sensitive questions.

In modern workplaces, alongside physical, chemical, and biological hazards, other risks are linked to the organisation of work and to the nature of the work itself. This paper investigates the association between workers’ well-being and both psychosocial and physical risk factors at work proposing a synthetic measure suitable to generate insights on well-being at work and on individual risk factors. Exploiting data from the European Working Conditions Survey, we select as response variable the “self-assessed health”. As this proxy of well-being is measured on a Likert scale, Ordered Probit analyses are run, and respondents’ profiles are illustrated. Then, a Principal Component Analysis is carried out to build two synthetic measures summarising the selected risk determinants. The resulting first principal components are subsequently used as synthetic indicators in further, simplified, Ordered Probit models to explain the impact of different sets of risks on perceived health. Such a methodology allows for a straightforward interpretation of the results since many different risk drivers are replaced by two continuous synthetic indicators. Our findings, in line with existing research, confirm that both types of risk factors do exert a substantial impact on workers’ health, although the psychosocial determinants seem to be more prominent.

The paper explores the relationship between personal, economic and time-dependent covariates as determinants of the job satisfaction expressed by graduate workers. After discussing the main results of the literature, the work emphasizes a statistical modelling approach able to effectively estimate and visualize those determinants and their interactions with subjects' covariates. Interpretation and visualization of graduates' profiles are shown on the basis of a survey conducted in Italy; more specifically, the determinants of both satisfaction and uncertainty of the respondents are explicitly discussed.