Critical Analysis of Attitude Scales

This blog post is intended for communications 333: Persuasion, with the purpose of critically analyzing the benefits and setbacks of the semantic and visually oriented scales. These standard, self-report scales are used in professional settings to gather emotional information from staff, customers, patients, and all other users.

According to authors Robert Gass and John Seiter (2014), the semantic differential self-report scale, developed by Charles Osgood, Percy Tannenbaum, and George Suci in 1957, is based primarily on the connotative meanings that words hold for people. Opposite adjectives (happy-sad, pleasant-unpleasant, light-dark) are used to convey emotional memory responses for the user to complete, and the overall attitude of the user is determined by the average of the spaces checked on all of the items.

If this survey is used to gauge a person's feelings towards a particular subject, then one example to keep in mind would be completing a survey on rating your boss or manager's work habits. Looking at the picture example to the left will give a visual of the opposing words used to evoke one's attitude and how the average is obtained.

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As stated by Gass and Seiter (2014), visually oriented scales, (also called Visual Analog Scale) differs from the semantic scale in a few ways. This scale works by using simple (often cartoon-like) drawings to represent degrees of favorability toward a person or thing. Users can mentally visualize these expressions and identify their own emotion with one of the expressions. The most common place one might see these scales used are classrooms or doctor's offices, often for younger users due to the simplicity of the pictures. More often than not, there's a link between what a person see's and what they feel. This can often trigger their memory of an attitude by connecting image with feeling, which is a major benefit of the visually oriented scale. As stated earlier, utilizing this scale is particularly beneficial with children and adolescents to describe pain or discomfort because finding the correct words might be too difficult.

Even with the many benefits of these scales, neither of them are infallible. For instance, the semantic scale works well for educated people who are good with words, but perhaps would be ineffective for those who struggle with language and connotative meaning. It could be difficult for some to identify an "in between" emotion for the adjectives given in the scale, therefore rendering the results inaccurate if the user was confused in any way.

The visually oriented scale may be a bit more user friendly, seeing as most facial expressions are somewhat universal even when language is not. However, this may not convey the proper level of emotion some users have. For instance, if the expression someone would use to describe their attitude towards something was not represented in the scale, the results could also be rendered slightly inaccurate. According to Gass and Seiter (2014), another major limitation to these self-report scales are known as the Social Desirability Bias, which simply put means that when people know they are being observed, they tend to do what they feel will be acceptable norms of conduct, which again can skew results. For example, an employee may respond differently to the semantics scale if they are being watched by their employer. A child may respond differently to the visual scale if they are aware of their parent in the room. These factors come into effect when considering the scale's credibility in a particular situation.

Attitude scale's are viable routes of collecting information on emotion and have proven quite useful in many aspects of the working world. Analyzing the visual and semantic scales have shown the various ways to connect with people by measuring their attitudes and possibly improving on something they dislike. Granted, a person's attitude towards a certain behavior is critical to know before surveying results. Learning about the Theory of Reasoned Action, developed by Martin Fishbein and Isaac Ajzen, helps to understand people's intentionality. Gass and Seiter (2014) say that this theory assumes that people are rational decision makers who make use of all available information. Therefore, one will use his/her beliefs about the outcome of their decision and their attitude toward the outcome to get an actual outcome. This ties into the scales because as stated earlier, not everyone will have the same emotion or be able to associate their attitudes with the scales. All things considered, the impact of the scales' usefulness will more than likely continue to universally stand strong.

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Gass, R. Seiter, J. (2014). Persuasion: Social Influence and Compliance Gaining 5th Edition. New York, NY:Routledge.

Figure 1: Semantic scale example. http://psc.dss.ucdavis.edu/sommerb/sommerdemo/scaling/semdiff.htm

Figure 2: Visually Oriented scale example. https://100mba.net/pain-worth-solving/