[logophobia]

I wonder if it's possible to assign a weight to each of the possible scores to correct for the "perceived" distance so you can still use all these existing tools in a statistical valid way.

Also, this observation could be interpreted a bit differently:

> The probability that a user changes her rating between 2 and 3 is almost 0.35 while the probability she changes between 4 and 5 goes down to almost 0.1. This is a clear indication that users perceive that the distance between a 2 and a 3 is much lower than between a 4 and a 5.

It seems a bit counter intuitive that the distance between 3 (neutral) and 4 (positive) is smaller then 4 and 5 (very positive). You could also interpret this differently. When a user changes his mind, he has to change his mind in such a way that the difference is significant enough to also change the review (is the review now a little bit wrong or very wrong). This means that he might actually see the difference between 3 and 4 as larger then 4 and 5, large enough for him/her to change the review. This effect is dampened the amount of time the user actually changes his mind this way. If you look at it in that way then the amount of pairwise inconsistencies are the wrong way to measure the distance between these ordinal categories in this particular case, because there actually might be two mechanisms that cancel each other out.

[dhimes]

Do we know if there is a difference in perception by the respondent if the scale is numerical? A scale of 1-5 might be seen as having different intervals than a scale whose range is strongly-disagree -- strongly agree.