Abstract
Social psychologists have long been interested in the research on attitudes. The attitude structure of the reasoned action model has attracted their attention, and they have also raised questions, above all, about the scoring system for beliefs and evaluations. The purpose of this study is to explore the influence of scale psychometric characteristics and scoring systems on the relationships between beliefs and attitudes toward the behavior. It is found that the scoring system is the most influential factor on the correlation between beliefs and attitudes, and the scale psychometric characteristics are the next. After adjusting for the influence of scale psychometric characteristics, it is found that the scoring procedure by using unipolar for beliefs and unipolar/bipolar for evaluations shows a significantly higher correlation between beliefs and attitudes than that by using bipolar for both beliefs and evaluations. The bi-dimensional construct for the scale of beliefs and evaluations shows a significantly higher correlation between beliefs and attitudes than the uni-dimensional construct for that, and so is for the scale of attitudes. The reliability of the attitude scale shows a significantly positive correlation between beliefs and attitudes; however, the reliability of the belief scale does not. Again, the influence of scoring systems on the relationships between beliefs and attitudes is not determined by the scale psychometric characteristics. Therefore, it is very necessary for us to pay much attention to the influence of scale psychometric characteristics and scoring systems on the relationships between beliefs and attitudes toward the behavior in order to improve their predictive validity.
| Keywords: | scale psychometric characteristics; scoring systems; beliefs; attitudes |
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