What do reliability and validity mean?
Direct measurement of attitudes, through self-report and inventories is standard in most attitude research. The three major types of attitude measures are Thurstone scales, Likert scales and Osgood’s semantic differential scales. Thurstone scales A Thurstone scale contains approximately 20 questions, each representing a different degree of favourableness or unfavourableness toward an attitude object. Creating a Thurstone scale takes considerable time and effort. You need to produce about 100 statements representing different degrees of favourableness and unfavourableness towards the attitude object. Various experts then give their opinion as to the weighting that should be given to each statement. The expert’s ratings become the scale value for each statement and the total scored by the respondent, is the totalled scale values. An example of such a scale, about attitudes to jogging, might be: Check the statements with which you agree. ———– 1. Jogging is the best way to start a d
