How Muslim and Western Publics See One Another By Richard Wike and Brian J. Grim supp4

To make the index consistent across items, the two positive characteristics—generous and honest—were coded so that a respondent received a “1” if he or she said the trait did not apply and a “0” if the trait did apply. For each of the seven items, “Don’t know” and “Refused” responses were recoded to .5, making them the equivalent of a neutral score between 0 (no) and 1 (yes). The authors also conducted the factor analysis and calculated the country mean index scores with “Don’t know” and “Refused” responses recoded as missing values, and the impact on the results was minimal.

Details about the index