Which is worse: "not good" or "not very good"?

We've been sent a wellbeing survey at work, and one of the questions is just "How are you feeling?" and a 5 point scale to reply on, covering "Very good", "Good", "Neutral", "Not good", and "Not very good".

That last, and supposedly worst one, is clearly just mirroring the best option of very good, but it sounds wrong, and as though not very good should be better than an absolute not good. It feels like the not applies to the quantifier very, rather than the word good, so you might be not very good, but still a bit good, and not good is just an absolute absence of feeling good.

What do you think GRcade?

Please respond.

A better scale:

Cuttooth wrote:A better scale:

Truly unambiguous and international

Should be ‘very not good’. Perfect grammar and that.

Knoyleo wrote:
Cuttooth wrote:A better scale:

Truly unambiguous and international

Wait

means 'neutral' hang on

No wait...

Cuttooth wrote:A better scale:

To aid accessibility I've suggested some alt-text for these:

Very Happy
Smile
Simper
Gosling
Cry

Not good is worse than not very good.

Not very good to me says “I could be better”, while not good says “I am doing bad”

I would take from it

Not Good - not good at all, not even a fait glimmer of goodness

Not Very Good - still not good good but could be moderately good or be experiencing certain aptitudes to the day that are good (just not very good obviously)

Last edited by Drumstick on Tue Oct 13, 2020 9:23 am, edited 1 time in total.

Not good.

Something deemed "not very good" can still be "good", but not "very good".

Cuttooth wrote:
Knoyleo wrote:
Cuttooth wrote:A better scale:

Truly unambiguous and international

Wait means 'neutral' hang on

No wait...

Maybe

Also, I agree. 'Not very good' isn't a great choice there.

I always thought
Not very good: can still get some use out of it
Not good: pretty much useless.

That survey is really not good.

It's either a fumbled attempt to make a unipolar likert scale, failing to account for the general interpretation of litotes that would put "not very good" further left on the scale than "not good", or it's a deliberate attempt to try and skew responses towards the left (which the slightly unusual ordering would support given the left side bias in responses).

This post took me 15 minutes to write

OrangeRKN wrote:It's either a fumbled attempt to make a unipolar likert scale, failing to account for the general interpretation of litotes that would put "not very good" further left on the scale than "not good", or it's a deliberate attempt to try and skew responses towards the left (which the slightly unusual ordering would support given the left side bias in responses).

This post took me 15 minutes to write

The ordering in my OP is actually my fault, the survey as is runs the other way, from not very good on the left, to very good on the right.

Don't very know

Not very good is gooder than not good

Double not good

Knoyleo wrote:Don't very know

Which is worse: "not good" or "not very good"?

Which is worse

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