Attitude Scales: An Analysis of the Benefits, Downfalls, and Theoretical Approaches

This blog post is for COMM 333 Persuasion. I’m going to be analyzing the Likert and Visually Oriented attitude scales. The Likert scale is used to determine an individual’s attitude towards a statement by using a scale ranging from strongly agree to strongly disagree (Gass & Seiter, 2016). Likert scales are often used when surveying the success of an event. An organization or business will often send out a survey with few statements asking the participants how they felt the organization did, and the participants choose one of the five options based on their attitude. The Visually oriented scale uses images to allow an individual to picture their attitude in response to a statement or question (Gass & Seiter, 2016). Visually oriented scales are commonly seen in hospitals and used for patients to quickly and effectively describe their pain level based on increasing painful facial expressions on the scale.

Likert Scale

The Likert scale is beneficial in measuring attitudes because it uses the answers provided by the participants to determine their specific attitude to various topics (Gass & Seiter, 2016). Researchers can use these averages from different participants to determine overall attitudes from a general population or target public. For example, a manager could be trying to identify if employees inside of an organization feel supported by their management team. The manager then emails out a survey containing Likert scale statements based around the level of support employees receive. Once all the surveys have come in, the manager can see the attitudes of employees and can further improve how the organization’s management supports the employees. This could also be used externally, such as a survey on a customer’s in-store shopping experience or satisfaction with purchase.

The Likert Scale requires more thought to complete. Some are not willing to put in the effort to be thoughtful in their answers or find themselves clicking through the survey to be done with it. This can result in the attitudes being averaged to be skewed or not completely accurate.

The ELM talks about both central processing and peripheral processing (Gass & Seiter, 2016). In the case of the Likert scale, participants are going to be mainly required to use central processing as there aren’t many other things for them to put their focus into (Garcia, 2023a; Gass & Seiter, 2016). Participants are highly involved because they focused more on analyzing the statement at hand and choosing an answer that relates to them (Garcia, 2023b; Gass & Seiter, 2016). The TRA will determine if a participant will actually engage themselves with the scale (Gass & Seiter, 2016). If the participant has a positive attitude towards the survey and has the intention to engage themselves with the survey, then that is exactly what they will do and vice versa (Gass & Seiter, 2016). However, the participant can be influenced by their beliefs, such as the survey will or won’t do anything, which also plays a role in their actual behavior (Gass & Seiter, 2016).

Visually Oriented Scale

The Visually Oriented Scale is beneficial in measuring attitudes because it allows participants to have a visual aid to describe their attitude (Gass & Seiter, 2016). Like I said before, this scale is used often in hospitals or various doctors’ offices. This can be beneficial when there isn’t much time or motivation to think deeply such as when a patient is in serious physical pain or even deep emotional pain. For example, a therapist could ask a distraught patient to use a visual scale depicting increasingly sad faces if they’re struggling to verbally communicate how they feel.

My main criticism of the scale is that all individuals may take perceive the scale differently. If a person is describing their pain, a doctor and patient may view the face they choose differently so the scale wouldn’t be universal.

The ELM uses peripheral processing to explain how some individuals might focus on messages other than the main one at hand (Garcia, 2023a; Gass & Seiter, 2016). While I agree that visual oriented scales largely use peripheral processing, I feel that they fall more into parallel processing where both central and peripheral are used (Garcia, 2023a; Gass & Seiter, 2016). While the visual aspect may be more used participant, they still need to use some thought while choosing a depiction. The participant might have low involvement if they’re primarily using peripheral processing to compare their attitude to the depiction given (Garcia, 2023b; Gass & Seiter, 2016). According to the TRA, an individual might believe that if they’re in front of someone they love, they should pretend to be in less pain than they actually are, which means an individual might not be honest in their answer (Gass & Seiter, 2016).

Reflecting on what I’ve learned, I’ve found that is important to be engaged when participating in an attitude scale. Additionally, it is important to focus on the messages at hand as described by central processing in the ELA (Gass & Seiter, 2016). Finally, when referencing TRA, I learned to look for and understand the outside noises that might be playing a role in my attitude and therefore influencing my behaviors (Gass & Seiter, 2016).

References

Garcia, I. (2023a). Elaboration likelihood model (ELM) [Canvas post]. Old Dominion University. https://canvas.odu.edu/

Garcia, I. (2023b). The role of involvement in elaboration likelihood model [Canvas post]. Old Dominion University. https://canvas.odu.edu/

Gass, R. H., Seiter, J. S. (2016). Persuasion: Social influence and compliance gaining (5th ed.). Routledge.