i guess i don't see it exactly like this ... attitudes have never been
about stimuli ... but people ... people have attitudes ... stimulus objects
don't ...
in edwards book, which by the way is perhaps the best (so what if it is
old?) book on this topic ... he quotes thurstone (paraphrasing) as
defining an attitude as: '... any symbol, phrase, slogan, person,
institution, ideal or idea WHICH PEOPLE CAN DIFFER ... WITH RESPECT TO
POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE AFFECT ... '
even if we scale the items ... ultimately, what we are interested in is
whether people would agree or disagree with some characterization OF a
stimulus ... that is, would see the stimulus in a negative or positive light
and, even with rasch modeling (and fancier models) ... yes we do scale
items in the sense (cognitive tests for example) in terms of difficulty
BUT, the goal is to be able to use those items to scale the people ... on
some trait of interest
i wish more people would have a good study of edwards classic book in this area
allen edwards, techniques of attitude scale construction, 1957,
appleton-century-crofts, inc
and also actually read likert's work ... to see what he said and did not
say ... rensis likert, a technique for the measurement of attitudes,
archives of psychology, #140, june 1932 ...
but that's just my take on things
At 11:52 AM 5/17/00 -0500, Paul R Swank wrote:
>The methods of attitude scale construction have gone full circle it seems.
>The original work (Thurstone) evolved out of psychophysical scaling where
>the stimuli were scaled first. Then came Likert with summated rating scales
>that were much easier to construct because the items did not have to be
>scaled first. Now we have Rasch modeling and IRT where we are scaling
>stimuli first again. These procedures are much more mathematically complex
>than the original (psychophyical) ones because now, with the aid of
>computers, we can do it.
Dennis Roberts, EdPsy, Penn State University
208 Cedar Bldg., University Park PA 16802
Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED], AC 814-863-2401, FAX 814-863-1002
WWW: http://roberts.ed.psu.edu/users/droberts/drober~1.htm
FRAMES: http://roberts.ed.psu.edu/users/droberts/drframe.htm
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