| Abstract: | The knowledge explosion in combination with an overcrowded curriculum at all educational levels is causing many educators to place greater emphasis on attitude conceptualization. This paper confronts two interrelated problems, that problem dealing with the psychological concept of attitudes and the problem of attitude measurement. Conceptually, attitudes are explored from an affective, cognitive, behavioral, and biologic dimension. The result is a comprehensive attitude concept. The problem of attitude measurement is not that attitudes exist, nor that they are specific or general, but lies in the way that they are organized. With the current emphasis on computerized research and data analysis, it is astonishing that multiple factor analysis has been so infrequently used for attitude validation and instrumentation. As a measurement and analytic technique, multiple factor analysis provides the intrinsic power to isolate and identify attitudinal factors. Multiple factor analysis is a measurement technique designed to assess construct validity. As such, it unites psychometrics with psychological theory. Factor analysis as a computational technique and as a scale construction technique is explored. The principal component method of factor analysis is reviewed. Multiple factor analysis assists in the process of attitude scale construction in the following ways: 1.) determines the content (factorial) validity of a series of attitude statements by ascertaining whether they measure a single unitary characteristic or a complex of characteristics as reflected in an item intercorrelation matrix; 2.) contributes to the determination of construct validity by ascertaining the smallest number of factors that can be postulated to account for item intercorrelations 3.) provides the statistical research strategy upon which predictive and assessment instruments can be empirically determined from an unrotated factor matrix; and, 4.) serves in general as an objective basic research tool through which psychological traits underlying human attitudes can be derived. |
