 |
Psychology of Communication: attitudes
|
|
|
Psychology of Communication: attitudes
|
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.
You will almost certainly need to measure attitudes during your practical communication work. The following brief comments are intended as tips, but you should ensure that you also look at the sections listed at the end of this section, as other methods may be more helpful and some of the other sections discuss possible pitfalls you may not have thought of.
The questionnaire can be produced very rapidly on a spreadsheet package:
This allows you to transfer the data from completed questionnaires straight to the spreadsheet, which allows rapid calculation of results. You could also invite respondents to enter their answers directly at the computer.
Alternatively, a word processor allows rather more flexible presentation:
It's generally a good idea to run a pilot survey so as to eliminate any ambiguous statements, negative statements or statements which might seem unduly 'leading', such as the use of the word 'criminals' in the first example above.
In principle, it's a good idea to run the test on a group whose attitudes are known. For example, you would expect British National Party members to score negatively on attitudes to ethnic minorities. If they don't, there's something wrong with your survey. If they do, then your test is valid. In practice, though, it's not always easily possible to find such a group.
You should, if necessary, ensure that an expert in the field you are dealing with checks out the content validity of your questionnaire.
Attitudes
Consistency theory
Cognitive dissonance
Fishbein method
Kelly's Personal Construct Theory
Osgood's Semantic Differential
|