Attitudinal scale

In this tutorial, we will discuss Attitudinal scale in research.

✰ If you want to ascertain the attitude of students towards a teacher, the questionnaire framed may be open-ended or close-ended. ✰ If the questionnaire is open-ended, it may invite respondents from the sample to describe the attitude they hold towards teaching quality. ✰ If the researcher has framed close-ended questions, the respondent is given options, such as, ⟹ strongly agree (SA), ⟹ agree (A), ⟹ undecided (U), ⟹ disagree (D) and ⟹ strongly disagree (SD).

Types of attitude measurement scales

Types of attitude measurement scales

As the attitudinal scales are very important in qualitative research, the different types of attitudinal scales are as follows.

1. Likert scale.

2.Thurstone scale.

3.Guttman scale.

1. Likert scale:

✰ It is also termed a summated rating scale. It is the easiest one to construct. It is based upon the assumption that each statement or item on the scale has equal attitudinal value, importance or weight. The quality of a teacher may have many dimensions, like use of knowledge base, communication skills, presentation of contents, organization of material, promptness to solve student problems, etc. The respondents may have different attitudes towards different aspects. ✰ Some statements may be positive, some negative, and some neutral. Then, the scores may be assigned to different responses and the score of each respondent is calculated. Some respondents may have more positive attitude than others. There can be numerical scale as well. Instead of SA, A, U, D and SD, it will have values 5, 4, 3, 2, and 1. For example, when asked to express opinion whether one considers his job quite pleasant, the respondent may respond in any one of the following ways: (i) strongly agree, (ii) agree, (iii) undecided, (iv) disagree, (v) strongly disagree.

2.Thurstone scale:

✰ It may assign weights to the different statements, such as willing to solve student problem may have a weight of 1, the statement about subject knowledge has a weight of 1.5, and statement in the context of teaching skill can have the weight of 2 and the scores are calculated accordingly.

3.Guttman scale:

✰ It is mainly based on ratio scale. It is quite difficult to develop. On Guttman scale, items are arranged in an order that an individual who agrees a particular item also agree with the item of lower rank order. Example: series of items could be, 1) I am willing to be near the ice-cream. 2) I am willing to smell the ice-cream. 3) I am willing to eat ice-cream. 4) I love to eat ice-cream. Agreement with any one item would mean agreement with lower order items.

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