Attitude Measurement
Slide 1
Attitude measures are common in many marketing surveys. The goal of this lecture is to define
what we mean by an attitude and show different ways in which attitudes may be measured.
Slide 2
This cartoon is meant to reinforce the notion that measuring people’s attitudes is a dicey
proposition. At best, we hope that the answers that they provide to our attitude questions are
somewhat reflective of the way they think. At worst, the answers that they give us, especially if
the questions are ill conceived, can be quite squirrelly.
Slide 3 (No Audio)
Slide 4
The key notion here, in terms of the definition of attitude, is that it’s enduring, and therefore
reasonably stable. If I ask you today about your attitude toward this course, and then I ask you
next week about your attitude toward this course, your answers should be fairly consistent.
Slide 5
Attitudes are hypothetical constructs in the sense that marketing researchers assume that such
constructs exist. By assuming they exist and by measuring them, marketers seemingly are
better able to predict people’s subsequent behaviors. Here, the definition of hypothetical
constructs suggests that they are not observable directly; they must be measured by indirect
means. In the case of attitudes, those indirect means are either verbal expression or overt
behaviors. We can infer somebody’s attitudes about something—based on what they say or
what they indicate on a questionnaire—or by how they act.
Slide 6
The problem with attitudes as a hypothetical construct relates to causality. Marketers assume
that attitudes are predictive of people’s future behaviors. The psychological literature also
suggests that behaviors tend to influence people’s attitudes. For example, my requiring you to
attend class or to work through these online lectures regularly may subsequently induce more
favorably feelings towards the class because you have to justify to yourself that you repeatedly
attend. Seemingly, attitudes are causes of behaviors, but behaviors also are causes of attitudes.
Because a thing cannot be both a cause and an effect of the same other thing, attitudes are
problematic from a scientific perspective. That said, as one of my finance professors at Purdue
used to say, “In the kingdom of the blind, the one eyed man is king.” This maxim suggests that
although attitudes are imperfect indicators of people’s subsequent behaviors, they provide one
of the better tools to forecast those behaviors. As one of the better tools, they’re used by
researchers.
Slide 7
Psychologists and marketers think of attitudes algebraically and the next several slides will
show what I mean by that phrase.
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Slide 8
Marketers assume that attitudes have three components. One component is the affective
component, which refers to people’s feelings or emotions towards an object.
Slide 9
The second component of attitudes is the cognitive component, which sometimes is referred to
as neutral cognitions. The cognitive component entails people’s beliefs or knowledge about the
world independent about how they feel about those beliefs. For example, I’ve certain beliefs
about the fuel efficiency of my car, and I’ve different beliefs about the number of channels I
receive through my DirecTV and Tivo configuration. (Love that MLB package.) Cognitions are
merely the facts of the world as people understand them.
Slide 10
The third component of attitudes is the behavioral component, which addresses issues about
predispositions to act in a certain way, or people’s intentions to act a certain way, or people’s
expectations about acting a certain way. These intentions or expectations can be about things
as simple as ice cream or things as complex as a home or automobile.
Slide 11
For those of you who prefer graphic representation, this slide summarizes what I’ve just said. An
attitude, which is a hypothetical construct, is comprised of three sub-constructs; affect, the way
we feel about something; cognition, what we believe about that thing; and behavioral intentions,
what we intend to do about that thing. At the bottom of the slide, there are different indicators for
these three sub-constructs. Those indicators are what we measure with our questionnaire items.
Slide 12
Some of you may recall the hierarchy-of-effects model from a class on consumer behavior or a
class on advertising. This model assumes that people move from one state to the next in
sequence. First, people become aware that a product exists and that awareness can be
measured, either through aided or unaided recall. After they become aware, then they learn
about the attributes of that product—those neutral cognitions or factual knowledge. Once they
learn about that product, then they begin to form feelings towards it; hence, the affect
component. Then, they begin to like or dislike that product, which may become their first choice
or part of the set of products they might consider on their next purchase occasion. The next step
is purchase intentions. If people know of a product, know something about it, and have some
feelings about it, then they may intend to purchase it on their next purchase occasion. Finally,
people tend to act on those intentions, or at least that’s what this model forecasts. Note that the
three components of attitudes are represented by the middle three boxes in the figure:
knowledge, affect, and intentions.
Slide 13
This hierarchy-of-affects model assumes that people drop out along the way, and that’s what is
illustrated in this slide. Marketers can think about all users of a product, people who are aware
of a brand, people who prefer that brand, people who last bought that brand, and people who
are satisfied with that brand. This sequence is hierarchical. People first become aware, then
they become knowledgeable, then they have certain feelings, and then they have intentions to
buy. They may have purchased the brand the previous time and they—based on purchase
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experience—tend to purchase it on the next occasion. The reason I present this hierarchy is
because I want to stress the importance of measuring all three components of attitudes. It’s
insufficient to measure awareness only, although without awareness people can’t have opinions
on facts about the brand or feelings towards the brand or intentions to buy the brand. Marketing
researchers can measure people’s knowledge about a brand and that’s critical because
sometimes people are misinformed. Researchers can measure people’s liking of a brand
because that may be reflective of their subsequent behaviors. Researchers can measure
people’s intentions to purchase a brand because the closer the measure to people’s behaviors,
the more predictive that measure should be of those behaviors. Clearly, the name of the game
for marketing researchers is to predict the behaviors of potential customers accurately.
Slide 14
Although many theories you learned in other marketing classes are relevant to marketing
research, they are relevant especially for designing attitudinal measures. Here’s an example:
store loyalty may be conceived as an attitude or as a behavior. When we think of it as an
attitude, we typically measure store loyalty in terms of multiple store attributes, such as people’s
attitudes towards merchandising displays, assortment of goods, and value for the money.
However, we also can conceive of store loyalty in strictly behavioral terms, such as the
frequency that people visit a store. For example, if I tend to shop regularly at Dillard’s—if I went
there last week and the week before and the week before—then I’m also considered store loyal
strictly based on my behaviors; my attitudes towards Dillard’s are not considered. Hence,
marketing researchers who want to measure store loyalty could conceive of it in two very
different ways and design two very different types of measures. If conceived as an attitude, then
the appropriate measures entail people’s impressions about a store’s attributes; if conceived as
a behavior, then the appropriate measures entail the frequency with which people visit that
store.
Slide 15
I’d like to take this notion of theory a bit further. In the next several slides, I’ll discuss the notion
of conceptual and operational definitions. Before I can talk about a conceptual definition, I must
define concept, which is a generalized idea about a class of objects, attributes, occurrences, or
processes. Clearly, concept is a mental construct rather than a physical construct.
Slide 16
As a conceptual definition relates to how we conceive of a concept, an operational definition is
more mechanical. It specifies what the researcher must measure. Operational definitions are
really measurement definitions, and conceptual definitions are really theoretical definitions.
Slide 17
To be certain that it’s clear what I mean by an operational definition, here’s an example that’s
unrelated to attitudes: Who should be included as a household member? You may think that’s a
relatively straightforward notion, but you can see there are many issues about who should and
who shouldn’t count as a household member for census-taking purposes.
Slide 18
Here’s an example of conceptual and operational definitions that are more related to attitudes.
The example here is media skepticism, which is a hypothetical psychological construct that
marketing researchers measure. Here, media skepticism is defined as the degree to which
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people are skeptical about the reality presented by mass media. Seemingly, skepticism varies
among people: from people who are mildly skeptical and accept most of what they see and
hear, to people who completely discount and disbelieve whatever is presented in mass media.
Slide 19
Armed with this conceptual definition of media skepticism, what type of question might a
marketing researcher include on a questionnaire? Here’s an example of one possibility:
Please tell me how true each statement is about the media. Is it very true, not very true,
or not at all true?
Then here are the three statements:
(1) The program was not very accurate in its portrayal of the problem.
(2) Most of the story was staged for entertainment purposes.
(3) The presentation was slanted and unfair.
This example shows that the construct media skepticism requires multiple items to be
measured. It’s not the type of construct that can be assessed with one simple question, such as
“How skeptical are you about the accuracy of what’s portrayed in the media?” People don’t tend
to respond well to those types of global questions, any more than they could indicate their
impression of a store by answering a single question, such as “What do you think the image of
Dillard’s is?” When researchers try to assess store image, they explore many issues, such as
value for the dollar, quality of the merchandising display, et cetera. Note from these examples
that marketing researchers often are required to develop multi-item measures when they
explore attitudes in particular and hypothetical constructs in general.
Slide 20
This slide shows a single-item conceptual versus operational definition, which relates to
favorability towards a brand and a predisposition to purchase it on subsequent occasions.
Slide 21
As this slide summarizes, specifying the conceptual and operational definitions for attitude are
the first two steps in developing sound attitude measures. Once we have those measures, we
can then use them to collect data and then we can analyze the quality of those measures to
assess the underlying construct. I’ll talk more about steps 3, 4, and 5 in subsequent lectures.
Slide 22 (No Audio)
Slide 23
How can a marketing researcher assess people’s attitudes? A researcher can ask people in one
of four ways:
(1) To rank a set of competing objects, indicating which they prefer most to which they
prefer least
(2) To rate one or more objects on a set of characteristics
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(3) To sort several objects on a characteristic, which is somewhat like ranking but it requires
a physical rearrangement of things.
(4) To provide their choices: first preferred, second preferred, and third preferred choice.
Slide 24
Ranking tasks are best performed over a small number of objects. Respondents asked to rank
25 different makes of automobiles from their most preferred to their least preferred probably
could indicate—with some degree of reliability—their most preferred, their second most
preferred, and their least preferred. Any rankings between the top two and bottom one are likely
to be unreliable. To make those in-between rankings reliable, researchers typically limit
respondents to ranking only a few things; as a rule of thumb, let’s say roughly a half dozen.
Ranking more than a half dozen things will result in unreliable rankings for other than the most
and least preferred things.
Slide 25
Researchers can ask respondents to rate many more things than they rank because when
rating something, the respondents need only to consider one thing at a time.
Slide 26
Sorting, to a large extent, is similar to ranking. The advantage to sorting—as a mechanical
task—is that we can ask people to sort many more objects than we can ask them to rank. Thus,
sorts tend to be more reliable than ranking for a large number of objects.
Slide 27
Although it may not seem so initially, choice tasks are a type of attitude measurement because
we can infer people’s attitudes from their choices. Marketers assume that the brand chosen as
most preferred is the one about which the respondent has the most positive attitudes and the
brand selected as least preferred is the one about which the respondent has the least favorable
attitudes.
Slide 28
To recap, the goal of this lecture was to first define attitudes, in terms of their three components:
affect, cognitive, and behavioral intentions. The second goal was to stress the importance of
theory in designing sound attitude measurements. The third goal was to define both conceptual
and operational definitions, show how they differ and show how they relate to one another. The
final goal was to indicate different ways that marketing researchers use to measure attitudes:
ranking, rating, sorting, or choice approaches.
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