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Techniques of attitude scale construction

"This book is concerned with techniques for the construction of attitude scales. Once a set of attitude statements has been collected, there are two general methods that have been used in the development of attitude scales. One of these methods involves the use of a judging group. The judging group is not asked to respond to the statements in terms of their own agreement or disagreement with them, but rather to judge the degree of favorableness or unfavorableness expressed by each statement. These judgments are then used as a basis for determining scale values of the statements upon a psychological continuum. Once the scale values of the statements are known, subjects can then be asked to express their agreement or disagreement with the individual statements. Attitude scores for these subjects can then be obtained based upon the prior knowledge of the scale values of the statements. The judgment methods for constructing attitude scales differ only in the manner in which the judgments and scale values of the statements are obtained. They include the method of paired comparisons, the method of equal-appearing intervals, and the method of successive intervals. These methods are described in Chapters 2 through 5. A second method of developing attitude scales is based upon direct responses of agreement or disagreement with attitude statements. Since the response methods do not require prior knowledge of the scale values of the statements in any exact sense, a judging group is not necessary. It is sufficient for the response methods if one can assume that the response "agree" to a statement indicates a more favorable attitude than the response "disagree," or vice versa. The response methods for constructing attitude scales include the method of summated ratings and scalogram analysis. These methods are presented in Chapters 6 and 7. Another method for constructing an attitude scale that makes use of both judgments and responses is described in Chapter 8. This method is termed the scale-discrimination technique. It is an early effort upon the part of Kilpatrick and myself at a synthesis of a scaling and a response method for developing an attitude scale. H-technique, as described in Chapter 9, is also a response method. It has as its objective the improvement of a cumulative scale--a kind of scale about which more will be said in the text. In this chapter I have also described another effort at a synthesis of scaling and response methods which, for want of a better name, I have called W-technique. This, in brief, represents the content of this book"--Preface. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved).

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