ATTITUDE SCALE

 ATTITUDE SCALE 

 

               Attitude scales have been designed to measure attitude of a subject of group of subjects towards issues, institutions and group of peoples. 

             The term attitude is defined in various ways, “the behavior which we define as attitudinal or attitude is a certain observable set” organism or relative tendency preparatory to and indicative of more complete adjustment.” - L. L. Bernard 

           “An attitude may be defined as a learned emotional response set for or against something.” - Barr David Johnson 

             An attitude is spoken of as a tendency of an individual to react in a certain way towards a Phenomenon.  It is what a person feels or believes in.  It is the inner feeling of an individual.  It may be positive, negative or neutral. 

              Opinion and attitude are used sometimes in a synonymous manner but there is a difference between two.   An opinion may not lead to any kind of activity in a particular direction.  But an attitude compels one to act either favourably or unfavourably according to what they perceive to be correct.  We can evaluate attitude through questionnaire.  But it is ill adapted for scaling accurately the intensity of an attitude.  Therefore, Attitude scale is essential as it attempts to minimise the difficulty of opinionnaire and questionnaire by defining the attitude in terms of a single attitude object.  All items, therefore, may be constructed with graduations of favour or disfavour.

Purpose of Attitude Scale 

          In educational research, these scales are used especially for finding the attitudes of persons on different issues like: • Co-education • Religious education • Corporal punishment • Democracy in schools • Linguistic prejudices • International co-operation etc.

Characteristics of Attitude Scale 

 Attitude scale should have the following characteristics.

      • It provides for quantitative measure on a unidimensional scale of continuum.

• It uses statements from the extreme positive to extreme negative position.

      • It generally uses a five- point scale 

. • It could be standardised and norms are worked out.

 • It disguises the attitude object rather than directly asking about the attitude on   the subject.

Examples of Some Attitude Scale 

 Two popular and useful methods of measuring attitudes indirectly, commonly used for research purposes are:

 • Thurstone Techniques of scaled values.

 • Likert’s method of summated ratings.

 Thurstone Technique  

        Thurstone Technique is used when attitude is accepted as a unidimensional linear Continuum.  The procedure is simple.  A large number of statements of various shades of favourable and unfavourable opinion on slips of paper, which a large number of judges exercising complete detachment sort out into eleven plies ranging from the most hostile statements to the most favourable ones.  The opinions are carefully worded so as to be clear and unequivocal.  The judges are asked not express their opinion but to sort them at their face value.  The items which bring out a marked disagreement between the judges unassigning are discarded.  Tabulations are made which indicate the number of judges who placed each item in each category.  The next step consists of calculating cumulated proportions for each item and ogives are constructed.  Scale values of each item are read from the ogives, the values of each item being that point along the baseline in terms of scale value units above and below which 50% of the judges placed the item.  It we’ll be the median of the frequency distribution in which the score ranges from 0 to 11. 

                    The respondent is to give his reaction to each statement by endorsing or rejecting it.  The median values of the statements that he checks establishes his score, or quantifies his opinion.  He wins a score as an average of the sum of the values of the statements he endorses. Thurstone technique is also known as the technique of equal appearing intervals.

The Likert Scale 

             The Likert scale uses items worded for or against the proposition, with five- point rating response indicating the strength of the respondent’s approval or disapproval of the statement.  This method removes the necessity of submitting items to the judges for working out scaled values for each item.  It yields scores very similar to those obtained from the Thurstone scale.  The first step is the collection of a number of statements about the subject in question.  Statements may or may not be correct but they must be representative of opinion held by a substantial number of people.  They must express definite favourableness or unfavourableness to a particular point of view.  The number of favourable and unfavourable statements should be approximately equal.  A trial test may be administered to a number of subjects.  Only those items that correlate with the total test should be retained. All favourable statements are scored from maximum to minimum i. e. from a score of 5 to a score of one or 5 for strongly agree and so on 1 for strongly disagree.  The negative statement or statement opposing the proposition would be scored in the opposite order . e. from a score of 1 to a score of 5 or 1 for strongly agree and so on 5 for strongly disagree.

The total of these scores on all the items measures a respondent’s favourableness towards the subject in question.  If a scale consists of 30 items, the following score values will be of interest. 

 

 30x 5=150     Most favourable response possible 

 30x 3= 90      A neutral attitude 

 30 x1= 30       Most unfavourable attitude 

 

 It is thus known as a method of summated ratings.  The summed  score of any individual would fall between 30 and 150.  scores above 50 will indicate a favourable and scores below go an unfavourable attitude.

Limitations of Attitude Scale  

 In the attitude scale the following limitations may occur:

 • An individual may express socially acceptable opinion conceal his real attitude. • An individual may not be a good judge of himself and may not be clearly aware of his real attitude.

 • He may not have been controlled with a real situation to discover what his real attitude towards a specific phenomenon was

. • There is no basis for believing that the five positions indicated in the Likert’s scale are equally spaced.

 • It is unlikely that the statements are of equal value in ‘forness’ or “againstness”. It is doubtful whether equal scores obtained by several individuals would indicate equal favourableness towards again position.

 • It is unlikely that a respondent can validity react to a short statement on a printed form in the absence of real like qualifying Situation.

 • In spite of anonymity of response, Individuals tend to respond according to what they should feel rather than what they really feel. 

 

Construction 

 In making the initial list of statements the following criteria are listed by Edward (1957). 

• Avoid the statement that refers to the past rather than to the present

• Avoid statement interpreted in more than one way

• Avoid statements irrelevant to the psychological object under construction 

• Keep the language of the statement simple, clear and direct

• Statements should be short, rarely exceeding 20 words

• Each statement should contain only complete thought 

• Avoid the use of double negatives

• Statement should be in the form of simple sentences

Collecting and editing of statements

A large number of statements which express a feeling toward the psychological object are collected. The number of favourable and unfavourable statements should be approximately equal.

Try out

The preliminary draft of the scale is administered to a sample of 200 subjects who are selected from the population for which the scale has to be administered. Each item in the attitude scale is followed by 5 responses indicating the degree of strength of the attitude.

• Strongly Agree (SA)

• Agree (A)

• Undecided (U)

• Disagree (D)

• Strongly Disagree (SD)

Selection of items and preparation of the final draft

                     According to Edward’s the two groups provide criterion group – high criterion group and low criterion group in terms of evaluating the individual statement. In evaluating the responses high and low group, a ratio of t is found out. A’ t ‘value equal to or greater than 1.75 indicates the average response of the high and low groups to the statement. Finally 20-25 statements with the largest ’t’ value are selected for the final draft of the attitude scale.

Reliability and validity

                  The validity of these type of scales can be done by comparing them with older scales. Content validity can be established by subjecting the scale to expert criticism. Reliability can be established through split half and test - methods.

Analysis and interpretation of attitude scores

                   The interpretation of the summated attitude score of the individual is done with the help of mean of the norm group.

Reference

Best, J, W;& Kahn, J.V. (2007), Research in Education, New Delhi: Prentice Hall  of India Private Ltd

Cohen, L; &Manion, L. (1994). Research Methods in Education (Fourth  Edition).London:Routledge

Krishnaswami, O.R. (1993). Methodology of Research in Social Sciences. Bombay: Himalaya Publishing House.

Neuman, W. L. (2011). Social research methods: Qualitative and quantitative

        approaches (7th ed.). Toronto: Pearson.

Reddy, C.R. (1987). Research Methodology in Social Sciences. New Delhi: Daya Publishing

House