Marketing Scales &

Marketing Attitude Scales

Ciocodei Alexandru
Gr. 1753, Seria D
Attitudes are enduring patterns of belief which it is believed are
predictive of behaviour. So if someone expresses generally positive attitudes
about a hospital service, then it might be expected that that person would be
highly likely to use that service. Similarly if a patient says they are
dissatisfied the standard of care offered by the National Health Service, then
we probably wouldn't be too surprised to find that they use private health
care services.
Although attitude scales bear a superficial resemblance to
questionnaires, they are actually closer to standardised tests, and as such will
have undergone more rigorous development and evaluation of reliability and
validity. There are several types of attitude scales but the two most common
are the Thurstone and Likert scales, named after their authors.
Thurstone scales typically present the reader with a number of
statements to which they have to respond, usually by ticking a "true" or
"false" box, or "agree", "disagree", i.e. a choice of two possible responses.
For example:
The health services provided at this hospital are of the highest
standard...... Agree( ) Disagree( )
People should avoid smoking if they want to remain healthy.......
Agree ( ) Disagree ( )
Although these statements look simple they will have been arrived at
following a quite involved development phase. In the first stage of the
development a large number of positive and negative statements are
produced about the attitude object - this could easily run into hundreds.
Next a panel of experts are asked to rate each statement on an eleven
point scale where 1 = highly negative attitude and 11 = highly positive. The
mean value of all the judges ratings for each statement is then calculated to
produce the scale value. Those items on which the judges cannot agree are
discarded.
We may now have a number of statements with the same scale value
and a randomising procedure can be used to select the statement to be
retained in the final attitude scale. Thus the final scale will contain items

which cover the whole range of attitudes towards the attitude object, ranging
from highly negative to highly positive. The respondents attitude is
measured using the scale values associated with items to which they
respond. A high overall score thus indicates a highly positive attitude and
vice versa for low scores.
Likert scales use a slightly different approach which makes their
development somewhat easier. Again a number of statements, both positive
and negative are produced, but in this case rather than asking for simple
"agreement" or "disagreement" with the item, the respondent is provided
with a range of possible responses. Thus, using the above examples:
The health services provided at this hospital are of the highest
standard
Strongly Agree, Agree, Undecided, Disagree, Strongly Disagree
People should avoid smoking if they want to remain healthy
Strongly Agree, Agree, Undecided, Disagree, Strongly Disagree
An appropriate scoring scheme is associated with each of the five
possible responses, e.g. Strongly Agree = 5, Agree = 4, Undecided = 3,
Disagree = 2, Strongly Disagree = 1. This could of course be reversed if
desired.
The written scale may be replaced by a combination of written and
numerical thus:
People should avoid smoking if they want to remain healthy
Strongly Agree 1...........2...........3............4............5 Strongly Disagree
Sometimes, if the researcher wants to avoid, an undecided category,
then they may choose to use an even number of choices, i.e. 4 or 6.
To calculate the overall score, the scores associated with the responses
made are simply added, and in the above examples a high score would
indicate positive attitudes and a low score negative.
To decide on the final items to be included in the scale, statistical
procedures, e.g. item analysis, is used to determine which items discriminate
most highly, and therefore should be retained, and which items have poor
discrimination and can be rejected from the final scale.
For both the Likert and Thurstone scales, the reliability of the scales
tends to increase with the number of items. However as the number of items

in a scale increases, so the time taken to complete the attitude will also
increase, and this may demotivate the respondents. There is no hard and fast
rule to determine the final number of items in a scale and this will reflect the
nature and complexity of the attitude being assessed. Generally fewer than
20 items may reduce reliability unacceptably, but more than 30 will begin to
demotivate the respondent.