Attitude formation and Measurement

Attitude formation 

when an attitude forms because it has been reinforced through reward or a pleasant experience or discouraged through punishment or an unpleasant experience. For example, a parent might praise a teenager for helping out at an after-school program with little kids. As a result, the teen may develop a positive attitude toward volunteer work. Similarly, many people find that broccoli has a terrible taste, and so they dislike broccoli because of its punishing flavor.

Why measure attitudes

People have likes and dislikes and have them in varying degrees. But why study and measure them? Attitudes are action tendencies and as such they can facilitate or hinder action at all levels--individual, group, community, state, and national.

Consider the case of population control. Among the various possible activities toward progress, the government of India wanted its people to adopt birth control and compulsory sterilization was introduced in certain parts of the country. But, this move, as we all know, gave rise to immense anxiety and antagonism among people and the programme ended in a fiasco.

Such blatant disregard for people's attitudes not only thwarted many a corresponding programme of the government, but, tagged on to other grievances of the kind under Emergency, also turned into a massive time bomb which, after an adequate gestation period, blew up the once invincible reign of Mrs. Gandhi and her colleagues.

At the same time, certain other activities like the introduction of new variety seeds in agriculture and the introduction of adult education had a better fate.

To determine, therefore, what action to introduce when and how to introduce it for the desired effect among a target population, the action planners must know how far the existing action tendencies of the population are receptive/resistant to the proposed action.

Such knowledge would help devise appropriate means for triggering the desired change.

Approaches to Attitude Measurement

How do we measure attitudes? We have said that we arrive at measures of attitudes by inference. But we need data on which to base our inference. Such data are collected by various methods.

We may observe the ongoing behavior of people in the natural setting;

we may directly ask the respondents to state their feelings with regard to the issue under study;

we may assign a well-defined task to respondents and record their performance;

we could generate data by giving the respondents partially structured stimuli to interpret or react to.

Direct observation

This method involves recording the actual behavior of people whose attitude is to be studied. It is indeed an objective method and well suited for certain kinds of issues. For example, it is quite commendable to observe the actual overt behavior of strikers by participating in the strike itself to gain a measure of the strikers' attitude. We could also observe a company executive in his day-to-day dealings with his subordinates to assess his attitudes towards them. Not all issues, however, lend themselves to direct observation. Can you, for instance, use this method of data collection to study the attitude of voters? Even the most dedicated and non-partisan psychologist would not have access to the polling booths to observe the actual voting behavior of people.

Further, even when we have managed to spot some behavior related to our study, we do not know if the behavior was an outcome of the related attitude or one caused by other factors. Take for instance a boy who goes to church regularly. You have observed his behavior, all right. But, does this behavior mean that he is favorably inclined toward prayer and religion? Not necessarily. On asking him directly, you may discover that his girl friend cherishes religious sentiments and attends prayer services regularly. He goes there only to meet her!

Direct questioning

If we want to know how people feel about a certain thing, it seems most natural to ask them straight away as to what their feelings are. But, however logical and smooth this technique may seem to be, it serves only a limited purpose of roughly classifying respondents as favorable, unfavorable, and indifferent with regard to a psychological object.

 if you were to study people's attitudes toward the National Emergency when the Emergency was on, many a respondent would be reluctant to give you an answer or would, in all likelihood, loudly proclaim a favorable attitude. When controversial issues are involved and pressures and threats are operative, direct questioning is not the suitable means of data collection for assessing attitudes.

Even when no threats are present, not all individuals are capable of articulating their feelings. A person may possess certain attitudes and behave accordingly, but may not be aware of them.

Scales of Measurement

Measurement is assignment of mathematical symbols to objects and events according to rules. In order to assign different symbols to different objects, one must be able to differentiate objects on a given aspect, attribute or property. Such differentiation may be rough and crude or may be refined and specific. You may, for instance, want just to classify objects, persons, or responses into different categories. A nominal scale will suffice for this purpose. The only criterion to assign "objects" to different categories of a nominal scale is whether the objects are the same or different with regard to the property being studied. To classify individuals, for example, according to the province they come from or according to the religion they belong to would constitute a nominal scale. If you assign numbers to the different categories in this scale, the numbers are just identification names. They are not amenable to mathematical operations like calculations of means, coefficients of correlation, etc. You can, of course, count the number of subjects under each category label (numeral or verbal) and find the modal category in which the highest number of individuals fall. You may also perform a test of association, if you categorized the individuals according to two (or more) attributes. For example, if you categorized individuals both according to their province and their religion, you could perform the Chi-square test to see if a particular province(s) tend(s) to be associated with a particular religion.

If you want to know the relative positions of persons or objects with respect to a characteristic, you need an ordinal scale, in which individuals or objects are ranked as first, second, third, etc., depending on the more or less of the attribute possessed by the individuals or objects. The ordinal scale can state who has more or less of the attribute under study, but not how much more or how much less. If person P is ranked first, Q second, R third, etc., we cannot know if the difference between P and Q is or is not the same as the difference between, for instance, U and V; the magnitude of difference between any two consecutive ranks remains unknown and is likely to vary.

An interval scale can tell us whether P is as much higher than Q as Y is than Z on a particular attribute. In other words, in an interval scale, the difference between any two adjacent positions is the same as the one between any other two adjacent positions. Thus, the interval scale is an improvement over the ordinal scale, even as the latter is over the nominal scale.

There is another type of scale, called the ratio scale, which is commonly used in the physical sciences. To have a ratio scale the absolute zero point needs to be determined. A ten-inch rod can be said to be exactly twice as long as a five-inch one, because both the rods share a common starting point, namely, the real zero point. But in the subject matter of the social sciences, the zero point is arbitrary and, therefore, we cannot express relationships in terms of strict ratios. Psychophysics has made attempts, in limited areas, to establish absolute zero points. By and large, however, social sciences do not use ratio scales; they employ ordinal and interval scales in their studies.

With a view to assessing the degree of attitudes possessed by persons and to be able to study a large number of people, the scaling technique was introduced into attitude measurement. Various scales of attitude measurement have been developed. Here we shall only broadly discuss the characteristics of some prevalent attitude scales so as to get acquainted with the general steps involved in their construction and use. It is likely that, in spite of numerous scales being available(*), you do not find one handy or suitable when you take up a particular study. Knowledge of how to develop an attitude scale will obviate such a crippling situation and help you have an instrument tailor-made for a given study. For a detailed discussion of how to construct an attitude scale, you may refer to Allen L. Edwards' (1957) Techniques of Attitude Scale Construction.

Thurstone's Scale

To construct the Thurstone scale, a large number of statements are collected which express various possible opinions about the issue or object of study. These statements, after an editing for relevance and clarity, are sorted into eleven sets that ranges from most unfavorable, through neutral, to most favorable.

When administered, the respondent just checks the items s/he agrees with and her/his attitude score is the mean value of the items s/he checked.

Likert's Scale

For the Likert scale, various opinion statements are collected, edited and then given to a group of subjects to rate the statements on a five-point continuum: 1=strongly agree; 2=agree; 3=undecided; 4=disagree; and 5=strongly disagree. The subjects express the degree (one to five) of their personal agreement or disagreement with each of the statements. Only those items which in the analysis best differentiate the high scorers and the low scorers of the sample subjects are retained and the scale is ready for use. To measure the attitude of a given group of respondents, this scale is given to them and every respondent indicates whether s/he strongly agrees, agrees, is undecided, disagrees, or strongly disagrees with each statement. The respondent's attitude score is the sum of her/his ratings of all the statements. For this reason, the Likert scale is also known as the scale of Summated Ratings.

In the Thurstone scale, the respondent checks only those items with which s/he agrees, whereas in the Likert scale s/he indicates her/his degree of agreement or disagreement for all the items in the scale.

By and large, a great majority of researchers prefer the Likert technique to Thurstone's