If you want to find out the attitude of respondents towards an issue, you can ask either a closed or an open-ended question. For example, let us say that you want to ascertain the attitude of students in a class towards their lecturer and that you have asked them to respond to the following question: ‘What is your attitude towards your lecturer?’ If your question is open ended, it invites each respondent to describe the attitude that s/he holds towards the lecturer. If you have framed a closed question, with categories such as ‘extremely positive’, ‘positive’, ‘uncertain’, ‘negative’ and ‘extremely negative’, this guides the respondents to select a category that best describes their attitude. This type of questioning, whether framed descriptively or in a categorical form, elicits an overall attitude towards the lecturer. While ascertaining the overall attitude may be sufficient in some situations, in many others, where the purpose of attitudinal questioning is to develop strategies for improving a service or intervention, or to formulate policy, eliciting attitudes on various aspects of the issue under study is required.
But as you know, every issue, including that of the attitude of students towards their lecturers, has many aspects. For example, the attitude of the members of a community towards the provision of a particular service comprises their attitude towards the need for the service, its manner of delivery, its location, the physical facilities provided to users, the behaviour of the staff, the competence of the staff, the effectiveness and efficiency of the service, and so on. Similarly, other examples — such as the attitude of employees towards the management of their organisation, the attitude of employees towards occupational redeployment and redundancy, the attitude of nurses towards death and dying, the attitude of consumers towards a particular product, the attitude of students towards a lecturer, or the attitude of staff towards the strategic plan for their organisation — can be broken down in the same manner.
Respondents usually have different attitudes towards different aspects. Only when you ascertain the attitude of respondents to an issue by formulating a question for each aspect, using either open-ended or closed questions, do you find out their attitude towards each aspect. The main limitation of this method is that it is difficult to draw any conclusion about the overall attitude of a respondent from the responses. Take the earlier example, where you want to find out the attitude of students towards a lecturer. There are different aspects of teaching: the contents of lectures; the organisation of material; the lecturer’s ability to communicate material; the presentation and style; knowledge of the subject; responsiveness; punctuality; and so on. Students may rate the lecturer differently on different aspects. That is, the lecturer might be considered extremely competent and knowledgeable in his/her subject but may not be considered a good communicator by a majority of students. Further, students may differ markedly in their opinion regarding any one aspect of a lecturer’s teaching. Some might consider the lecturer to be a good communicator and others might not. The main problem is: how do we find out the ‘overall’ attitude of the students towards the lecturer? In other words, how do we combine the responses to different aspects of any issue to come up with one indicator that is reflective of an overall attitude? Attitudinal scales play an important role in overcoming this problem.
Attitudinal scales measure the intensity of respondents’ attitudes towards the various aspects of a situation or issue and provide techniques to combine the attitudes towards different aspects into one overall indicator. This reduces the risk of an expression of opinion by respondents being influenced by their opinion on only one or two aspects of that situation or issue.
Source: Kumar Ranjit (2012), Research methodology: a step-by-step guide for beginners, SAGE Publications Ltd; Third edition.
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