We have found Annett’s paper to be a very useful exposition of the objectivity/subjectivity debate and to have been very helpful in our own discussions of measurement in workload, situation awareness and virtual environments (VEs) participation. Although we take issue with some of his points, we are broadly in agreement with his arguments. We have great sympathy, for instance, with his observations on mental workload scale applicability for populations different to those on which they were developed (we also doubt their utility in real work settings rather than the controlled or simulated settings usually found in the aerospace domain), with his criticisms of the potential wastefulness of Likert-type scales and with his doubts about the provenance of some of the measures of useability within human - computer interaction research. (Author/publisher)
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