Analysis of the Human Attitude

Surveying the Human Attitude genus Melissa Hightower November 19, 2012 PSY475 University of capital of Arizona Surveying the Human Attitude Attitude can be seen in many parts of a daily routine of an individualistic. The moment of measuring position has become important in many atomic number 18as of our society. Employers essential to measure attitude of employees, while customers on the other side of the anticipate view att Attitude Survey The measure of attitudes is of great importance in a consumer driven economy, such as the wiz that exists in the coupled States today.Psychologarithmists use attitude perspectives to translate subjective attitudes of people into empirical data. Attitudes themselves ar distinguishable from interests and personality features, in that attitudes are usually attached to an butt (Hogan, 2007). The construct of attitude actually encompasses the cognitive, affective, and behavioral thoughts, feelings, and actions that a person butt ons in re action toor as a result ofan object. For the purposes of this paper I designed an attitude study using a selected-response format that is reinforced upon the precepts of the SERVQUAL approach to attitude assessment.The purpose of the survey is to assess the attitudes and acquaintances that University of Phoenix (UOP) students exhibit at graduation active UOP itself. The intention of this paper is to discuss the design, administration, scoring, and recitation of the survey as well as any issues I undergo while creating the survey. Design The target audience for this survey is UOP graduates that attended at least their sophomore and senior college years at UOP. The particular trait to be measured is the attitude that graduating students hold towards UOP after graduations.The survey should be administered electronically via the UOP student login page after graduation. There are 11 items in the survey and should take no more than 1-2 minutes to complete. I did this on purpose, beca use I know from experience that I hate fetching long surveys when all I really wanted to do was log into UOP online. The survey uses the Likert scale of measurement to measure attitude, with the possible answers of strongly dis match, disagree, neutral, agree, strongly agree with the corresponding scores of -2, -1, 0, +1, and +2, respectively. The score report is used to compile the individual scores into a descriptive format.The item stems are the assertions themselves and the responses are gauged by dint of the Likert scale, otherwise known as the system of summated ratings (Hogan, 2007). The basic proposition of the Likert scale is that one attitudinal construct is at the basis of all of the items. All of the statements that I proposed are nearly the attitude of the graduate toward UOP and therefore addresses this concern. Administration, Scoring, and Interpretation The survey should be administered by UOP personnel and non the teachers. It would not do for the results of t he survey to be skewed by the last class experience.This factor cannot be done away with entirely, but it can be minimized by having the survey administered by UOP personnel rather than a teacher. Moreover, in a general sense the lower the score the less the satisfaction and the higher(prenominal) the score the lower the satisfaction. The directionality of the scores are all in the same direction, meaning that a rating of strongly disagree ever so corresponds to a more unfavorable attitude toward UOP. However, it is important that the survey items be well-tried out on a large variety of students at UOP and the scores tabulated in advance.These scores will act as a means to convert the raw scores that will be tranquil when the examen is actually distributed on a large scale to normed scores, which are more useful for edition. For instance, if there is universal tendency to score one item extremely negative, then the raw scores of the actual test can be mediated to take into acco unt this propensity. For the purposes of a general attitude survey negative scores reflect negative perceptions and thoughts about UOP and positive scores the opposite.Issues Experienced While Creating Survey The SERVQUAL approach to attitude surveys is specifically designed for quantifying service quality and product satisfaction in the retail industry (Gob, 2007). As the SERVQUAL approach applies to this attitude survey, the main touch of any survey is to ascertain the examinees expectations, perceptions and the gap between them. Therefore, I tried to design items to measure both the expectations of the UOP student as well as their perception of the item in question.This will increase the validity of the interpretation that lower scores equal less satisfaction and vice versa, since the items not only deal with the students actual perception, but their expectations as well. I also tried to encompass the entire spectrum of measurementscognitive, affective, and behavioralwhen consid ering the items to be administered. I am not comfortable with simple self-reported tests. They seem withal subjective and too circumstantial. The items should gauge observable behavior, past feelings, and current thoughts about the construct macrocosm measured. ConclusionIn sum, the attitude survey that I created follows the Likert scale method to gauge the overall satisfaction of UOP students, with an emphasis on both the perception and expectation of the items. The survey also attempts to measure the cognitive, affective, and behavioral components of the construct being tested. The purpose of the survey was to ascertain the general attitude that UOP students have toward the University of Phoenix at graduation. References Gob, R. (2007). Ordinal methodology in the analysis of Likert scales. Quality & Quantity, 41(5),601-626. Retrieved July 24, 2010, from SocINDEX with undecomposed Text database.