Asking Questions - The Definitive Guide To Questionnaire Design ...

124 ASKING QUESTIONS
Assessing the Strength of Attitudes
Strength is a concept that can be applied to each of the three components
of attitudes. Evaluations may be strongly or weakly held,
beliefs may be certain or uncertain, and actions may be definitely
committed to or only vaguely contemplated. Three general strategies
for measuring attitude strength are as follows: (1) build a
strength dimension into the question itself by measuring evaluations
and strength at the same time; (2) use a separate question to
assess the strength; (3) assess strength by asking a series of independent
questions, each one reflecting the same general underlying
attitude. In this third case, the measure of attitudinal strength is
determined by the total number of items a person agrees with. This
third method of asking multiple items can be applied to each of the
components, although in practice attitude strength is more usually
assessed in the general or overall evaluative dimension.
Perhaps the most frequent method of measuring intensity of
attitudes is to build an intensity scale into the response categories.
People’s responses indicate not only the direction of their evaluation
but also their intensity or certainty. A common method is to
ask respondents a question that measures both the direction and the
intensity of an evaluation, as in the first question on daylight savings
time quoted in the previous section. This question could have
been asked as two separate questions. For example, “Do you like or
dislike [year-round] daylight savings time?” and “Do you like or dislike
it [year-round daylight savings time] somewhat or very much?”
In this case, the simplicity of the like-dislike dimension and the
simplicity of the two intensity modifiers suggested that they could
be combined into a single question that respondents could easily
comprehend. Note that respondents who said they did not care
either way were not urged to say which direction they were leaning
in. In this case, however, respondents were discouraged from
indicating indifference, since a “Don’t care” response category was
not included. (This point will be discussed more fully in the next
chapter.)