Measurement of attitudes

• Suppose you want to find out the attitudes of college students towards
people who are mentally ill. How would you go about that?
• Attitudes are measured on the basis of a person’s verbal statements of
belief/feeling towards the topic under consideration
 Unstructured methods
• Open-ended interviews (How do you feel about individuals who are
mentally ill?)
• Sentence completion tests ( People with mental
illness……………………..)
 Structured methods
• Four types of scales/methods used in attitude measurement
• Likert’s method of summated ratings
• Thurstone’s method of equal appearing intervals
• Bogardus social distance scale
• Osgood’s semantic differential scale
 Likert’s method of summated ratings
• Principle- Measuring attitudes by asking people to respond to a series of
statements about a topic, in terms of the extent to which they agree with
them, thereby tapping the cognitive and affective component of attitudes
• Assumes that the strength/intensity of experience is linear, i.e. on a
continuum from strongly agree to strongly disagree
• e.g. I don’t like to work with transgenders.
Strongly agree/ Agree/ Undecided/ Disagree/ Strongly disagree
• Each of the five responses would have a numerical value which would be
used to measure the attitude under investigation
 Thurstone’s method of equal appearing
intervals

• This kind of scale is used to measure people's attitude towards a fairly

clear and unidimensional concept, using a number of statements that vary
in how they express a positive or negative opinion about the main
concept.
 Steps:

1. Determine the focus: what concept are you going to measure (see what
people's attitudes are toward it)?
2. Ask a group of people (or a person) to write down different statements
about this concept, reflecting different opinions or attitudes about the
subject. Make sure you have a large number of statements, making sure
that people can either degree or disagree with them (no - open - questions
for instance).
3. Rating the scale items: the next step is to have experts rate each statement
on a 1-to-11 scale in terms of how much each statement indicates
a favourable attitude towards the concept. The members of the group must
not express their own opinion, they must only indicate how favourable they
feel each statement is. You can use a scale with 1 = extremely favourable
attitude towards the subject (focus) and 11 = extremely unfavourable attitude
towards the subject.
4. Compute the median and interquartile range for each statement. Create a
table with these values and sort by the median.
5. Select the items for the actual scale: you should select statements that are
at equal intervals across the range of medians. Within each value, you should
try to select the statement that has the smallest Interquartile Range. This is
the statement with the least amount of variability across judges.
 Bogardus Social Distance Scale
• Early technique for measuring attitudes toward racial and ethnic groups
• The basic concept behind the Bogardus scale is that the more prejudiced
an individual is against a particular group, the less that person will wish to
interact with members of that group
• Thus, the items that compose a Bogardus scale describe relationships into
which a respondent might be willing to enter with a member of the
specified cultural group (e.g., spouse, friend, neighbor, co-worker, citizen,
visitor to our country).
• Items are worded in terms of inclusion or exclusion.
• “Would you accept a person with mental illness as a spouse?” is an
example of an inclusion question
• “Would you keep all people who have mental illness out of Kerala?” is an
example of an exclusion question
• The attitude or esteem with which the respondent holds the specified
group is defined as the closeness of relationship that the respondent
reports as being willing to accept with a member of that group.
 Osgood’s semantic differential scale
• A type of a rating scale designed to measure the connotative meaning of
objects, events, and concepts. The connotations are used to derive the attitude
towards the given object, event or concept.
• An application of his more general attempt to measure the semantics or
meaning of words, particularly adjectives, and their referent concepts. The
respondent is asked to choose where his or her position lies, on a scale between
two polar adjectives (for example: "Adequate-Inadequate", "Good-Evil" or
"Valuable-Worthless"). Semantic differentials can be used to measure opinions,
attitudes and values on a psychometrically controlled scale.
How effective are these scales?