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In working with Focus Groups we have, from time to time found it important to define what we mean.
It may be helpful for people working in this area to consider how to define Attitude (and Importance and Influence).
How to define Attitude
You may want to provide evidence of and agree with your Focus Groups that attitude of the Stakeholders is defined as
To a greater of lesser degree the positive or negative nature of reputation, esteem, prevailing mood, temper or favour with the Organisation.
To what extent are Stakeholders negative or positive towards Organisations?
To what extent are Stakeholders attitude of value to our Organisations?
To what extent do Stakeholders affect belief in the Organisations?
To what extent are Stakeholders likely to favour the Organisations' events?
To what extent do Stakeholders have a significant effect on the reputation/profile of the Organisations
To what extent do Stakeholders influence opinion about the Organisations?
Alternatively:
Can Stakeholder relationships be described in terms of: good or bad, liking or disliking in terms of intentions and or actual behaviour associated with the Organisation and manifestations of as beliefs, opinions and ideas.
It may be helpful for the moderator and or the Focus Groups to consider which approach to attitude they wish to take based on academic research.
Various definitions of attitudes have been formulated over 70 years of research. It is not difficult to find discursive descriptions which may point towards expressions that encompass the following: When the organisation, brand or service of which a person has an idea becomes associated with pleasant or unpleasant events or with the persons’ aspirations and goals, they attach a corresponding affect or an emotional tinge to that Organisation, brand or service.
Milton Rokeach has defined attitude as relatively enduring beliefs around an object (Organisations) or situation ( event) predisposing a person to respond in some preferential mannerii. This affected belief provokes and focuses the person in their regard for the organisation.
More precise, and long held, definitions say that attitudes are identified as: affective (emotional reactions), cognitive (beliefs) and behavioural.
Modern use emphasises affect and cognition as the two central elements of attitudes. People need attitudes to be able to codify the vastness of stimulation around us and help reduce the anxiety in acquiring a working knowledge of the world. These prejudices, however formed, are a form of shorthand to help make quick decisions rather than to explore every avenue offered by the rich stimulus and context of daily life.
Classical social psychology would have it that attitudes are commonly viewed as either positive or negative evaluations of an object (e.g. Organisation, issue, stakeholders, brand) and they guide our actions and responses to the world; they help define social reality. The three aspects of definition can be defined as followsiii.
- The affective component refers to the evaluation (good or bad, liking or disliking) of the attitude object (e.g. Organisations) and often reflects a person's values.
- The conative component refers to behavioural intentions and or actual behaviour associated with Organisations.
- The cognitive component refers to beliefs, opinions and ideas about Organisations.
The two types of attitudes (positive and negative) are likely to be acquired in quite different ways. Cognitively based attitudes are formed by learning information about the object (Organisations/Stakeholders). Affectively based attitudes can be acquired in a variety of ways, including general values such as religious and moral beliefs, or conditioning (association with positive or negative experiences).
Thus, in measuring attitude of individuals and Focus Groups, there is an element of context and experience to be taken into account. When media evaluation is included in Stakeholders relations evaluation there are compelling reasons to complete such analysis within a relevant context both of the readers (readership Stakeholders) and the textual (semantic and semiotic) content of the corpora (clips, citations, texts, images) (Phillips 2001).
There are a number of methods for measuring attitudes that have been developed by social psychologists and are described by academics such as Trochimi. They are: Thurstone's method of equal-appearing intervals and superseded by Rasch scalingv , Likert's method of summated ratings, Guttman's scalogram, and Osgood's semantic differential. By far the most common is the Likert scale, which involves summing ratings across a number of related items in a scale.
When content analysis companies and practitioners identify favourability, they will use this methodology or its derivative (and more accurate) Rasch scaling. In media content analysis the statements are frequently developed by the client (often simply marketing ‘messages’) and an analysis will make favourability judgements within such a scale.
For the Likert scale, various opinion statements are collected, edited and then given to a group of subjects to rate the statements on a five-point continuum: 1=strongly agree; 2=agree; 3=undecided; 4=disagree; and 5=strongly disagree. The subjects express the degree (one to five) of their personal agreement or disagreement with each of the statements. Only those items which in the analysis best differentiate the high scorers and the low scorers of the sample subjects are retained and the scale is ready for use. To measure the attitude of a given group of respondents, this scale is given to them and every respondent indicates whether he strongly agrees, agrees, is undecided, disagrees, or strongly disagrees with each statement. The respondent's attitude score is the sum of his ratings of all the statements. For this reason, the Likert scale is also known as the scale of Summated Ratings.
In the Thurstone scale, the respondent checks only those items with which he agrees, whereas in the Likert scale he indicates his degree of agreement or disagreement for all the items in the scale. Further, the development of a Likert scale does not require a panel of judges. It may also be noted that Likert did not assume equal intervals between the scale points. His scale is ordinal and, therefore, can only order respondents' attitudes on a continuum; it does not indicate the magnitude of difference between respondents.
It must be noted that the typical Likert technique requires an item analysis to establish that all the items in the scale measure the same attitude, no matter whether the scale has five or more points.
With a view to ensuring a cumulative measure of attitudes, Guttmanvi developed a more refined Scalogram to measure unidimensional attitudes. The scalogram consists of a set of statements related to the attitude in question and arranged in increasing order of difficulty of acceptance. To construct the scalogram, opinion statements are collected and arranged in such a way that most people would accept the first statement and, going down the list, fewer and fewer persons would accept the subsequent statements. The list of statements, thus arranged, is given to sample subjects in order to test the increasing degree of acceptance. Based on the "accept" responses of respondents, the items are accordingly modified, arranged, and tested again on sample subjects. This process continues untill a scalable (i.e., empirically tested for increasing degree of acceptance) set of items is developed. The final set of statements with their particular order is the scalogram. When this instrument is used for measuring a person's attitude, the person checks all the items he accepts. His score is the total number of successive or nearly successive items he has checked.
In practice, however, it has been observed that rarely respondents check items without skipping one or more items. This phenomenon confirms the difficulty involved in preparing a perfectly unidimensional scale. It may also point to the probable fact that people in real life respond not to a single dimension of reality, but to peculiar combinations of them.
Research by Osgood and his colleagues, has shown that people understand, or give meaning to, words or concepts along three dominant dimensions: the evaluative (good-bad) dimension; the potency (strong-weak) dimension, and the activity (active-passive) dimensions.
It has also been found that scores on the evaluative dimension correlate highly with other measures of attitude toward a particular social object.
The Semantic Differential, developed by Osgood, Suci and Tannenbaum, can be used to measure attitudes from the meaning (semantic = meaning or psychological significance) which people give to a word or concept that is related to an attitude object. This instrument consists of a series of bipolar adjectives such as fair-unfair, pleasant-unpleasant, good-bad, clean-dirty, valuable-worthless, etc. Each pair constitutes a continuum of seven points, the end-points being the opposites of the objective pairs and the midpoint being the neutral position. A sample of the bipolar continuum is given below:
.Fair. 1_______2_______3______4______5_______6_______7 Unfair
Helpful 1_______2_______3______4______5_______6_______7 Unhelpful
.Good. 1_______2_______3______4______5_______6_______7 Bad... ...
It would seem from all this work and research that the practitioner will have little problem in identifying robust methodologies for measuring attitude. If attitude equates to reputation, then we also have the beginnings of a methodology for measuring reputation within a relationship.
Arul, M. J., Attitude: Their Nature, Development and Change http://members.tripod.com/~arulmj/attitud1.html November 2001
Rokeach, M., The Nature of Human Values Free Press, New York (1973),
Beech, J.R. What is Social Psychology http://www.le.ac.uk/pc/jrb/ps100/ps100gm1.html October 2001
Trochim, W. (1999). The Research Methods Knowledge Base, 1st Edition. Atomic Dog Publishing, Cincinnati, OH. http://trochim.human.cornell.edu/kb October 2001
Guttman L 1950. The basis for scalogram analysis. In Stouffer et al. Measurement and Prediction. The American Soldier Vol. IV. New York: Wiley
Osgood, C.E., Suci, G.J., and Tannenbaum, P.H. The measurement of meaning. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1957.
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