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Appendix 2
Attitude is the degree of positive (favourable) or negative (unfavourable) opinion associated with some object, event
or person. You may be required to measure or quantify the attitude of your audience at different stages of the media
project such as
z To know the existing attitude of the people (baseline study)
z To find out the change in attitude of the people after exposure to media (summative evaluation)
How Do We Measure Attitude?
Different techniques are available to measure attitude. One is to use a rating scale. A simple technique to construct an
attitude rating scale is described below:-
Collection of Items or Statements
Informally discuss the issue with the people, extension workers, experts, NGOs and also consult secondary sources.
Based on that, collect a set of such statements on the issue as the acceptance or rejection of each should imply a
different degree of favourable or unfavourable attitude towards that issue. It could be a negative or a positive statement
such as:
z TV is not doing any good to society (negative statement)
z TV is a good source of entertainment (positive statement)
Editing of the Statements
After having collected as many relevant statements as possible, the next step is to go through each statement carefully
and edit them by keeping the following criteria in view:
Avoid such statements as
z Refer to the past (At one time TV used to attract large number of people)
z Are factual (such as TV is a modern medium)
z Can be interpreted in more than one way (TV is good in some ways and bad in other ways)
z Are irrelevant to the object under consideration
z Are likely to be endorsed by almost every one or no one (Buying a TV set proves expensive)
z Contain more than one thought
z Contain double negatives (Most people do not think that TV does not entertain)
z Contain words that may not be understood by the respondents (TV is an electronic medium)
z Contain such universals such as all, always, none, never, often etc as these introduce ambiguity
z Contain such words as o