MBA (Evening), University of Dhaka

Term Paper on:

Chapter 10: Collecting Data using attitudinal scales
Submission Date: August 23, 2021.

Assignment submission for:

Dr. Faruk Ahmed

Professor and Chairman,

Department of Management,

Faculty of Business Studies,

University of Dhaka.

Assignment submitted by:

Group-I:

SI NAME OF THE STUDENTS STUDENT ID

1 Md. Noor Alam 3-20-44-021

2 Rashedul Kabir 3-19-42-018
3 Nazmus Sahar 3-18-40-048

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CONTENT

 INTRODUCTION

 CONCEPT OF ATTITUDE

 COMPONENTS OF ATTITUDE

 LIMITATIONS OF ATTITUDE MEASUREMENT

 MEASUREMENT OF ATTITUDES

 QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH

 QUALITATIVE RESEARCH

 FUNCTIONS OF ATTITUDINAL SCALES

 ATTITUDINAL SCALES IN QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH

 TYPES OF ATTITUDINAL SCALE

 THE LIKERT SCALE (SUMMATED RATINGS SCALE)

 CHARACTERISTICS OF THE LIKERT SCALE

 GUTTMAN SCALE

 THURSTON SCALES

 CALCULATING ATTITUDINAL SCORES

 THE EQUAL-APPEARING INTERVAL OR THE THURSTONE SCALE

 THE CUMULATIVE OR GUTTMAN SCALE

 ATTITUDES AND QUALITATIVE RESEARCH

 CONCLUSION

CONCEPT OF ATTITUDE

Attitudes are individual mental processes which determine both the actual and potential responses
of each person in a social world. Since an attitude is always directed toward some object it may be
defined as “the state of mind of the individual toward a value.”

 Eysnck(1972), “An attitude is normally defined as a perceptual orientation & response

readiness in relation to a particular object or class of objects”.

 Frank Freeman,“ An attitude is a dispositional readiness to respond to certain situations,

persons or objects in a consistent manner which has been learned and becomes one’s typical
mode of response” .

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INTRODUCTION

 The word attitude has been derived from Latin word ‘Aptus’. Which means ability.

 Attitude is an established way of thinking or

feeling reflected in a person’s behavior towards

others.

 It is a tendency to respond positively or negatively towards a certain idea, object, person or

situation.

 In influences a person’s choices of action.

 It is what a person believes in or what a person feels.

COMPONENTS OF ATTITUDE

There are three main components of attitudes:

 A Cognitive Component

 Knowledge and beliefs

 An Affective Component

 The feelings or emotions toward an object

 A Behavioral Component

 Predisposition to action

 Intentions

 Behavioral expectations

LIMITATIONS OF ATTITUDE MEASUREMENT

 Criticized on account of their inability to predict behavior.

 Normally tend to overlook the immediate environment of the consumers.

 Relationship between attitudes and buying behavior still continues to be indistinct.

MEASUREMENT OF ATTITUDES

Figure: 1.0 Measurements of attitudes

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QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH

 You are able to explore, measure, determine the intensity and combine attitudes to different
aspects of an issue to arrive at one indicator that is reflective of the overall attitude.

 you can ascertain the types of attitudes people have in a community, how many people have
a particular attitude and what the intensity is of those attitudes.

 A number of techniques have been developed to measure attitudes and their intensity in
quantitative research

 The concept of attitudinal scales, therefore, is only prevalent in quantitative research.

QUALITATIVE RESEARCH

 you can only explore the spread of attitudes and establish the types of attitudes prevalent.

 No technique exists in qualitative research to measure attitudes and their intensity

 You do not make an attempt to measure or quantify.

FUNCTIONS OF ATTITUDINAL SCALES

If you want to find out the attitude of respondents towards an issue, you can ask either a closed or an
open-ended question. For example, let us say that you want to ascertain the attitude of students in a
class towards their lecturer and that you have asked them to respond to the following question: ‘What
is your attitude towards your lecturer?’ If your question is open ended, it invites each respondent to
describe the attitude that s/he holds towards the lecturer. If you have framed a closed question, with
categories such as ‘extremely positive’, ‘positive’, ‘uncertain’, ‘negative’ and ‘extremely negative’, this
guides the respondents to select a category that best describes their attitude. This type of
questioning, whether framed descriptively or in a categorical form, elicits an overall attitude towards
the lecturer. While ascertaining the overall attitude may be sufficient in some situations, in many
others, where the purpose of attitudinal questioning is to develop strategies for improving a service or
intervention, or to formulate policy, eliciting attitudes on various aspects of the issue under study is
required.

But as you know, every issue, including that of the attitude of students towards their lecturers, has
many aspects. For example, the attitude of the members of a community towards the provision of a
particular service comprises their attitude towards the need for the service, its manner of delivery, its
location, the physical facilities provided to users, the behaviour of the staff, the competence of the
staff, the effectiveness and efficiency of the service, and so on.

Similarly, other examples – such as the attitude of employees towards the management of their
organisation, the attitude of employees towards occupational redeployment and redundancy, the
attitude of nurses towards death and dying, the attitude of consumers towards a particular product,
the attitude of students towards a lecturer, or the attitude of staff towards the strategic plan for their
organisation – can be broken down in the same manner.

Respondents usually have different attitudes towards different aspects. Only when you ascertain the
attitude of respondents to an issue by formulating a question for each aspect, using either open-
ended or closed questions, do you find out their attitude towards each aspect. The main limitation of
this method is that it is difficult to draw any conclusion about the overall attitude of a respondent from
the responses. Take the earlier example, where you want to find out the attitude of students towards a
lecturer.

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There are different aspects of teaching: the contents of lectures; the organisation of material; the
lecturer’s ability to communicate material; the presentation and style; knowledge of the subject;

responsiveness; punctuality; and so on. Students may rate the lecturer differently on different aspects.
That is, the lecturer might be considered extremely competent and knowledgeable in his/her subject
but may not be considered a good communicator by a majority of students. Further, students may
differ markedly in their opinion regarding any one aspect of a lecturer’s teaching. Some might
consider the lecturer to be a good communicator and others might not. The main problem is: how do
we find out the ‘overall’ attitude of the students towards the lecturer? In other words, how do we
combine the responses to different aspects of any issue to come up with one indicator that is
reflective of an overall attitude?

Attitudinal scales play an important role in overcoming this problem. Attitudinal scales measure the
intensity of respondents’ attitudes towards the various aspects of a situation or issue and provide
techniques to combine the attitudes towards different aspects into one overall indicator. This reduces
the risk of an expression of opinion by respondents being influenced by their opinion on only one or
two aspects of that situation or issue.

DIFFICULTIES IN DEVELOPING AN ATTITUDINAL SCALE

3 Major Problems

 While measuring an attitude which aspects of a situation or issue should be included?

 How can one ensure that a scale really is measuring what it is supposed to measure?

1st problem is most complex one and it also elaborates at problem no two.
By providing a logical link with ones statement 2nd problem can be solved

 For combining the different aspects to obtain an overall picture , what procedure should be
adopted ?

For this problem, different types of attitudinal scale (Likert, Thurstone and Guttman) can be a solution

ATTITUDINAL SCALES IN QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH

Figure: 2.0 Types of attitudinal scales

THE LIKERT SCALE (SUMMATED RATINGS SCALE)

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• A multiple item rating scale in which the degree of an attribute possessed by an object is
determined by asking respondents to agree or disagree with a series of positive and/or
negative statements describing the object.

• Example:

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE LIKERT SCALE

• The following procedure is used to analyze data from Likert scales:

1. First, weights are assigned to the responses options, e.g. Totally agree=1, Agree=2, etc

2. Then negatively-worded statements are reverse-coded (or reverse scored). E.g. a score of 2
for a negatively-worded statement with a 5-point response options is equivalent to a score of
4 on an equivalent positive statement.

3. Next, scores are summed across statements to arrive at a total (or summated) score.

4. Each respondent’s score can then be compared with the mean score or the scores of other
respondents to determine his level of attitude, loyalty, or other construct that is being
measured

• Note that the response for each individual statement is expressed on a category scale.

GUTTMAN SCALE

This technique assesses the extent of the subject’s agreement with items, where the items are meant
to represent a continuum. For example, one might ask these questions:

1. Do you drink alcohol?

2. Do you smoke marijuana?

3. Do you use cocaine?

One might anticipate that all persons who answer “yes” to #3 would also answer “yes” to #1 and #2,
and so forth.

 This technique can be used to ask many questions in a short amount of space (mailed
survey) or time (telephone survey).
 The technique is intuitively appealing to most persons.
 The technique provides continuous-level and ranked data.
 The items have to form a continuum that is accepted by respondents and the community of
scholars.

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THURSTON SCALES

These are also known as equal appearing interval scales. They are used to measure the attitude
towards a given concept or construct. For this purpose, a large number of statements are collected
that relate to the concept or construct being measured. The judges rate these statements along an 11
category scale in which each category expresses a different degree of favorableness towards the
concept. The items are then ranked according to the mean or median ratings assigned by the judges
and are used to construct questionnaire of twenty to thirty items that are chosen more or less evenly
across the range of ratings.

The statements are worded in such a way so that a person can agree or disagree with them. The
scale is then administered to assemble of respondents whose scores are determined by computing
the mean or median value of the items agreed with. A person who disagrees with all the items has a
score of zero. So, the advantage of this scale is that it is an interval measurement scale. But it is the
time consuming method and labor intensive. They are commonly used in psychology and education
research.

CALCULATING ATTITUDINAL SCORES

THE EQUAL-APPEARING INTERVAL OR THE THURSTONE SCALE

The Thurstone scale calculates a weight or additional value for each statement. The weight for each
statement is calculated on the basis of rating assigned by a judges.

How to you create a Thurstone scale?

*Identify a research question related to attitude.

*Generate a series of agree-disagree statements about the subject that ask support the issue to
varying degrees.

*Assign each statement a score of 1 to 11 based on how strong you believe the statement is.

*I f you’re working in a study group, have each member score how strong they believe the statements
are.

The main advantage of this scale is that, as the importance of each statement is determined by
judges,
it reflects the absolute rather than relative attitudes of respondents.

THE CUMULATIVE OR GUTTMAN SCALE

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The Guttman scale measures how much of a positive or negative attitude a person has towards a
particular topic. The scale has YES/NO answers to a set of questions that increase in specificity. The
idea is that a person will get to a certain point and then stop.

Characteristics:

• Unidimensional in nature.

• Deterministic model.

• Reproducible questions are added.

• Ordinal nature of data.

Attitudinal scales and measurement scales:

Different attitudinal scales use different measurement scales.

Attitudinal scales : Measurement scales:

Likert scale Ordinal scale
Thurstone scale Interval scale
Guttman scale Ratio scale

ATTITUDES AND QUALITATIVE RESEARCH

Four types of scales are generally used for Marketing Research:

• Nominal Scale. This is a very simple scale.

• Ordinal Scale. Ordinal scales are the simplest attitude measuring scale used in Marketing
Research.

• Interval Scale.

• Ratio Scale.

Example: Jane believes that smoking is unhealthy, feels disgusted when people smoke around her,
and avoids being in situations where people smoke.

The four basic types of attitudes and behaviours that are :

 Positive
 negative
 Neutral and
 Sikken Attitude.

CONCLUSION

Both of the attitude scales discussed are valid, reliable data collection methods that would be
appropriate to investigate the attitudes of paramedics, but neither without weakness. Considering the
literature, it appears that Likert is a superior tool between the two methods, however there are other

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techniques that warrant consideration before deciding which to use for the purpose of the research in
question.

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