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In psychology and sociology, the Thurstone scale was the first formal technique to measure an attitude. It was developed by Louis Leon Thurstone in 1928, originally as a means of measuring attitudes towards religion. Today it is used to measure attitudes towards a wide variety of issues.
The Affective Slider is an empirically validated digital scale for the self-assessment of affect composed of two slider controls that measure basic emotions in terms of pleasure and arousal, [6] which constitute a bidimensional emotional space called core affect, that can be used to map more complex conscious emotional states.
In addition to scales, there are two other types of composite measures. Indexes are similar to scales except multiple indicators of a variable are combined into a single measure. The index of consumer confidence, for example, is a combination of several measures of consumer attitudes.
The term attitude with the psychological meaning of an internal state of preparedness for action was not used until the 19th century. [3]: 2 The American Psychological Association (APA) defines attitude as "a relatively enduring and general evaluation of an object, person, group, issue, or concept on a dimension ranging from negative to positive.
The semantic differential is today one of the most widely used scales used in the measurement of attitudes. One of the reasons is the versatility of the items. The bipolar adjective pairs can be used for a wide variety of subjects, and as such the scale is called by some "the ever ready battery" of the attitude researcher. [14]
Measurement in psychology and physics are in no sense different. Physicists can measure when they can find the operations by which they may meet the necessary criteria; psychologists have to do the same. They need not worry about the mysterious differences between the meaning of measurement in the two sciences (Reese, 1943, p. 49). [9]
Symptom and attitude tests are more often called scales. A useful psychological test/scale must be both valid, i.e., show evidence that the test or scale measures what it is purported to measure, [1] [4]) and reliable, i.e., show evidence of consistency across items and raters and over time, etc.
The scale has been used internationally to measure students’ attitudes towards the environment, and has also been adapted and optimized in various contexts. [27] The inventory has twelve scales, each of which contains ten survey items (Milfont & Duckitt, 2010, pp. 91-92):