attitude

Definition
A predisposition or a tendency to respond positively or negatively towards a certain idea, object, person, or situation. Attitude influences an individual's choice of action, and responses to challenges, incentives, and rewards (together called stimuli). Four major components of attitude are (1) Affective: emotions or feelings. (2) Cognitive: belief or opinions held consciously. (3) Conative: inclination for action. (4) Evaluative: positive or negative response to stimuli. Diffent methods of measuring Attitudes Attitude can be measured in several ways. Attitudes are revealed in the behaviour of an individual. So they can be measured by direct observation of overt behaviour of the individual this method, needless to point out has all the defects of observation. In addition to the difficult of experimentally creating a stimulated situation where on the behaviour can be observed.

. Methods of equal appearing intervals (Thurstone, 1929) Methods of grades dichotomists (Saffir,1937) Methods of summated rating (Likert, (1937) Scalogram analysis (Guttaman, 1944) Scale discrimination technique (Edwards and Kilpatrick, 1948) Unfolding technique (Combs, 1950) Method of unfolding partial rank order (Banta, 1961) Latent structure analysis (Lazarsfield, 1950) and Semantic differential (Osgood et al., 1957)

Among these, the most well known procedures are: 1.Thurstone's methods of equal appearing intervals

2. Likert'smethods of summated ratings. An overwhelming majority of scales have been developed by either of these techniques. According to Shaw and Wright (1967), this is probably a result of the greater complexity of the newer procedures. In this study, Likert's (1932) method of summated ratings is used because it is for easier than Thurston's method, but at the time yields scores very similar measure of attitude obtained by the two method was as high as 0.92 (Edwards and Henry, 1946 and Edwards, 1948).