Importance of an Attitude Survey - Essay Example

The most important trait of attitude surveys is validity (Haley and Case, 1979). The questions are designed to ensure that the subject answers them by exercising that part of the brain that controls the attitude. Different attitude survey methods are used to measure attitudes. Different surveys measure different attitudes. All of the survey techniques have their pros and cons. The three traits; cognitive, behavioral, and affective, are the main focus of the surveys.
Two main categories divide attitude measurement; direct and indirect measurements. In the former, the semantic differentials and the Likert scale are frequently used. In ‘indirect measurement’ different projective techniques are employed. Internal consistency is prime in creating any attitude test (Rossiter, 1977). The researcher should make a test in such a way that each statement should share a common underlying theme.
For this project, I will create a simple survey to measure the attitude of students toward the subject of psychology. To measure this, I will create a Likert scale. The Likert scale has a third personal statement to which the subject can choose one of the five responses; strongly agree, agree, neutral, disagree, and strongly disagree (Dutton & Blum, 1968). This survey should include questions from almost every possible angle covering the pros and cons of psychology.

I want to measure the students’ attitudes toward the subject of psychology. Even though there are many designs that I could follow, I wanted to pick that attitude survey design that scratches the surface and finds the underlying reason. The attitude survey that gets the direction or orientation would be more relevant than any other survey design.
To achieve such a neutral and accurate survey design, the subjects should bear in mind that they are not simply giving their opinions. They are to rate the statements according to their favorableness. The usual difficulty arises in the Likert scale when people put in statements that do not show the direction. During the process of creating this attitude survey, I had to discard statements that were neutral or did not show any direction.
After creating the survey comes the pre-testing path. This is important because it will point out any errors before disseminating them among the real subjects. The pretest subjects will highlight any ambiguities or mistakes. It will also point out if I need to eliminate any statements that do not exhibit the direction or score neutral.
The last part of the survey will be the scoring. It will give me the perspective of categorizing the results according to the attitudes. Moreover, to eradicate the bias there needs to be reverse scoring. It is essential to standardize the direction of the survey. For instance, a statement such as ‘I do not like psychology’ displays a negative attitude towards the subject. But a participant has to agree with the statement to show his/her disliking. This item will be scored as 1 for being negative.

The origin of such Likert chart testing come from the semantic differential, designed by Osgood et al. (1957). The objective of designing such a survey is to measure the activity and potency of the subjects. For instance, potency measures how powerful the topic is for the subject. Second, it measures if the subject is active or passive towards the object of the survey (in this case psychology).
It should be kept in mind that this survey has limitations just like any other survey. The test has to be reliable, however; theorists have emphasized that “there is no best way of assessing reliability” (Rossiter, 1977, p. 179). As each statement in the Likert survey gets equal weighting in the survey, it gets unbalanced in terms of the intensity of each statement. For example, the statement that ‘I like studying psychology a lot’ bears the same weightage in the evaluation as ‘psychology is crucial to learn. Moreover, not every possible attitude-measuring statement fit the bill of a Likert chart. But for being too complex, statements such as ‘psychology is more about theory and less about practice and hence requires zero labs testing’, will be too complex for a Likert statement.