Social Effects of the War in Iraq - Essay Example

As said before, it comes as no surprise that individuals directly involved in the war will develop an extremely negative impression of the Americans. But those individuals, who were not directly involved, like the American civilians, have developed a sympathetic attitude towards the Iraqi people.

This is because Americans are highly aware and they are much more civilized than Iraqi people. They value life more. At seeing the injustice being done to the Iraqis they took a sympathetic stand. (Garca, 2004) (Farris, 2002)These negative attitudes of the Iraqis need to be changed because where they might be correct, they are wrong about the fact that they should hate all Americans. The possible solution for Americans is to empathize with the Iraqis and lend a helping hand to them. Americans should help rebuild Iraq and give monetary help to those whose breadwinners have been killed in the war.

In time maybe, their attitude may change. It will take time because they have gone through a lot of psychological trauma and no one can blame them for acting in the way they are acting now. (Garca, 2004)One way in which attitude change of Iraqis can be measured is Louis Thurstone's successive intervals theory, in which you statistically place items of relevance on a continuum. The advantage of this is that you don't have to rely on the subjective answer of every subject and that a rank order is developed which is easier to read and draw conclusions from.

Another better approach is to use Guttman's uni-dimensionality theory. It is pretty much the same as Thurstone's but differs in that he stressed on uni-dimensionality of the situation. He says that if a person agrees to an all-encompassing statement, he should also agree to its parts for example "Wars are bad" and "wars over oil are bad" should carry equal weight in his head. This makes studying attitude change very simple and uncomplicated. But on the other hand, it reduces the precision of the research.