Attitudinal behavior is a certain set of observable behavior which is preparatory to and indicative of the subsequent actual behavior. For the purpose of measuring attitudes only the overt symbolic type of acts are taken into account because such acts alone can be observed. Examples of such acts are speaking; writing and gesturing etc.Attitude indicate a tendency which can be helpful in predicting the subsequent behaviour.Herein lies the importance of measuring attitudes. Measurement of attitudes is useful in various aspects of day to day life. For example it helps in predicting consumer behavior in making demand forecasts in providing an insight into the public response to various welfare measured indicated by the Government in maintaining peace and social order and in social research.

The sources of information regarding the attitude of a person are:

Life history documents including biographies, autobiographies, diaries, letters and memories.
Oral interviews: opinions of the respondent may be elicited by personally asking them various questions.
Questionnaires and polls: Sometimes in place of persons contact mailed questionnaire is also used for the purpose of getting opinions. Similarly public opinion polls are conducted to know peoples opinion on various issue.

In order to measure the degree of intensity of the attitude various kinds of scales have been devised.

These scales may be divided into the following categories:

Point scales
Ranking scales
Rating of intensity scales etc

Other scales for the measurement of attitudes are social distance, scale of Bogardus Thurston Scale, Likert scale and socio-metric scale by Moreno. However standard scales with universal application are yet to be devised.

Likert Scale

The Likert technique presents a set of attitude statements. Subjects are asked to express agreement or disagreement of a five-point scale. Each degree of agreement is given a numerical value from one to five. Thus a total numerical value can be calculated from all the responses.

Analysis and Interpretation of Data

The purpose of assembling data is to present some theoretical analysis or interpretation of it. But the processes of observation and analysis are rarely independent of one another. The problems become redefined as the research proceeds and this means changing accounts of observations made. In the social survey the pilot stage is very important since the sociologist derives preliminary information from it which he then uses to test existing hypotheses in a crude way. He may then have to modify both the hypothesis and in consequence the techniques for example he may change the schedule that he is using. Unstructured interview techniques and observations are particularly suitable where the questions must be changed when an analysis begins to throw up new problems which demand new information in order to answer them. Analysis of data involves seeking through observations with object of determination in what circumstances they do not or to check that if sociologist can support one interpretation rather then another. At this stage it is necessary to point out two difficulties in the use of sociological information for analytical or interpretative purposes. The first of these is called the reliability of data. This refers to the extent to which investigation are repeatable that is if the same procedures of data collection the same object categories and the same rules for establishing the veracity are used on the same subject by different observers or by the same observers on different occasions, no relevant changes have taken place on the main attempt results comparable with earlier studies can be obtained. If different answer emerged from the enquiries which should yield the same response then the date may not be used to represent and establish underlying regularity. The measures that sociologist can take to overcome unreliability in response will depend upon what procedures are used to collect the information and what type of analysis is to be made.

The second difficulty is that of the validity of data. Validity refers to the extent to which sociologist interpretation of underlying characteristics he wishes to reflect is in fact the faithful representation of the characteristics. The sociologists working with a positivistic framework may wish to represent some abstract notion such as Alienation by a set of relatively easily identified indicators. He may attempt to combine these into a single indicator of characteristics he wants to represent. Having done this however how can he be sure that his indicator reflects the characteristics of alienation effectively. The usual way to ascertain the suitability of indicators is to test them empirically on samples of subjects which are known from other evidence to be alienated or not alienated. Given however that the sociologist is reasonable satisfied with both the reliability and validity of data how does the analysis or interpretation proceed? This depends upon the framework within which the sociologist is working. Within a positivistic framework the sociologist will be interested in some hypothesis which he has derived from theory by examining the connection in his data between some specified dependent variable which he suspects have some causal influence. This implies that the initial stages of analysis which may be going on while the data are being assembled must be concerned with identifying the variables and in deciding what criteria may be reasonably used to represent these variables. Only after the positivist sociologist has satisfactorily defined and operationalised the variables he wants to test the casual proposition he is postulating can be proceed to test this.

The Advertising Network