ATTITUDES
MEASUREMENT OF ATTITUDE
An attitude cannot be recorded directly. We cannot view someone’s tendency to like something in the way we can see physical attributes, such as eye colour or running speed. Another difficulty is that attitudes can be expressed through many behaviours. Forexample, a person who likes music might listen to it all the time, buy countless CDs, attend numerous music concerts, and buy several magazines about music. How does a researcher go from information about such a variety of behaviours to an estimate of the person’s fundamental attitude towards music? One general approach is to examine one or more specific behaviours that are seen as directly reflecting attitude. For example, a person who has a negative attitude towards a particular immigrant group is likely to seek more physical distance from members of that group, avoid eye contact with them, show unpleasant facial expressions, and so on. Another general approach employs self-report questionnaires, which ask participants to express their attitude towards the particular object.The most common version simply asks respondents to indicate their attitudestowards a named object using semantic-differential scales. So people might be asked to rate their attitude towards immigrants using a scale from −3 (extremely bad) to +3 (extremely good). Typically, though, people rate their attitude using several different scales, each labelled by different adjective pairs (negative/positive, worthless/valuable, unfavourable/ favourable). Responses to the scales are then averaged to form an attitude score for each participant . Of course, self-report measures can be affected by people’s desire to state socially desirable attitudes. So while our respondentsabove may reveal negative attitudes towards immigrants in their behaviour, their self-reports may appear more positive because they are reluctant to seem prejudiced. Contemporary research therefore frequently uses non-self-report measures in cases like this – i.e. when people’s ability to rate their attitudes accurately is questionable. Despite this weakness, self-report measures have predicted a variety of relevant behaviours in past research, which suggests that we are at least somewhat accurate in reporting our own attitudes.Other measures elicit attitudes without relying on self-reports and without relying on overt behaviours towards the attitude object. For example, a common approach is to present the names of objects that people might like or dislike on a computer screen. Then the computer presents an adjective (e.g. terrible, pleasant) and respondents are asked to decide whether it means a good thing or bad thing. This question is easy to answer, and most people can
answer correctly every time. Nonetheless, responses to adjectives with a positive meaning (e.g. delightful) tend to be faster after people have seen something they like than after seeing something they do not like, whereas responses to adjectives with a negative connotation (e.g. awful) tend to be slower after people have seen something they like than after seeing something they dislike. By contrasting the speed of responses to the positive and negative adjectives, researchers can obtain a measure of attitude that predicts behaviour towards an attitude object (Fazio et al., 1995).
MEASUREMENT OF ATTITUDE
An attitude cannot be recorded directly. We cannot view someone’s tendency to like something in the way we can see physical attributes, such as eye colour or running speed. Another difficulty is that attitudes can be expressed through many behaviours. Forexample, a person who likes music might listen to it all the time, buy countless CDs, attend numerous music concerts, and buy several magazines about music. How does a researcher go from information about such a variety of behaviours to an estimate of the person’s fundamental attitude towards music? One general approach is to examine one or more specific behaviours that are seen as directly reflecting attitude. For example, a person who has a negative attitude towards a particular immigrant group is likely to seek more physical distance from members of that group, avoid eye contact with them, show unpleasant facial expressions, and so on. Another general approach employs self-report questionnaires, which ask participants to express their attitude towards the particular object.The most common version simply asks respondents to indicate their attitudestowards a named object using semantic-differential scales. So people might be asked to rate their attitude towards immigrants using a scale from −3 (extremely bad) to +3 (extremely good). Typically, though, people rate their attitude using several different scales, each labelled by different adjective pairs (negative/positive, worthless/valuable, unfavourable/ favourable). Responses to the scales are then averaged to form an attitude score for each participant . Of course, self-report measures can be affected by people’s desire to state socially desirable attitudes. So while our respondentsabove may reveal negative attitudes towards immigrants in their behaviour, their self-reports may appear more positive because they are reluctant to seem prejudiced. Contemporary research therefore frequently uses non-self-report measures in cases like this – i.e. when people’s ability to rate their attitudes accurately is questionable. Despite this weakness, self-report measures have predicted a variety of relevant behaviours in past research, which suggests that we are at least somewhat accurate in reporting our own attitudes.Other measures elicit attitudes without relying on self-reports and without relying on overt behaviours towards the attitude object. For example, a common approach is to present the names of objects that people might like or dislike on a computer screen. Then the computer presents an adjective (e.g. terrible, pleasant) and respondents are asked to decide whether it means a good thing or bad thing. This question is easy to answer, and most people can
answer correctly every time. Nonetheless, responses to adjectives with a positive meaning (e.g. delightful) tend to be faster after people have seen something they like than after seeing something they do not like, whereas responses to adjectives with a negative connotation (e.g. awful) tend to be slower after people have seen something they like than after seeing something they dislike. By contrasting the speed of responses to the positive and negative adjectives, researchers can obtain a measure of attitude that predicts behaviour towards an attitude object (Fazio et al., 1995).
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