The Influence of Scoring Systems on the Relationships Between Beliefs and Attitudes toward the Behavior - Under the Scale Constructs and Weighting Methods

Author: Kuo-Chang Wang (Graduate Institute of Health Education, National Taiwan Normal University)

Vol.&No.：Vol. 44, No. 1
Date：October 1999
Pages：1-17
DOI：10.3966/2073753X1999104401001

Abstract：

It is one of the concerns for the social psychologists to improve the correlation between beliefs and attitudes; however, the scoring system exactly results in many methodological issues, which should be solved in the future. The major purpose of this study is to investigate the influence of scoring systems on the relationships between beliefs and attitudes toward the behavior, and simultaneously to consider the scale constructs and weighting methods. Four empirical data were served for the purpose of this study, and they were properly transformed into new data to be analyzed via the factorial analysis of variance. It was found that the scoring system was the most influential factor on the correlation between beliefs and attitudes, the types of study and the scale constructs were the next; however, the weighting method was not. After adjusting the influence of the type of study, it was found that the scoring procedure by using unipolar for beliefs and unipolar/bipolar for evaluations was significantly higher correlations between beliefs and attitudes than that by using bipolar for both beliefs and evaluations. The multi-dimensional construct for the scale of beliefs and evaluations was significantly higher correlation between beliefs and attitudes than the uni-dimensional construct. Again, the influence of scoring systems on the relationships between beliefs and attitudes was only determined by the type of study, but not by the scale constructs and weighting methods. In all, the multi-dimensional scale by using unipolar for beliefs and unipolar/bipolar for evaluations may not only improve the predictive validity between beliefs and attitudes, but can also solve several methodological issues.

Keywords：Scoring systems, Scale constructs, Weighting Methods, Beliefs, Attitudes

《Full Text》