Attitude scales measure one or more aspects of an individual’s or group’s attitude toward some object. Individual’s responses to the various scales may be aggregated or summed to provide a single attitude for the individual. Similarly, group responses to the various scales may be aggregated or summed to provide a single attitude for the group.
These scales are of three types:
(a) Likert’s Summated Scales
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(b) Thurstone’s Equal Appearing Intervals Scale
(c) Guttman’s Cumulative Scale
Likert’s Summated Rating Scale is set of attitude statements of which all are considered or approximated as equal attitude value and to each of which subjects respond with degree of agreement of disagreement (intensity) carrying different scores.
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These scores are summed and averaged to yield an individual’s attitude score. Under this method, each respondent’s ranking is found out by totaling his scores on all the statements (usually 5). To illustrate this, let us have the following example:
| S. No. | Statement | Agree Disagree |
| 1. | Advertising promotes sales | 1 0 |
| 2. | HRD is exploitation of people | 1 0 |
| 3. | Hard work increases productivity | 1 0 |
| 4. | Effective time management reduces idle hours | 1 0 |
| 5. | Money and other physical benefits are the only motivations | 1 0 |
This procedure, however, suffers from following drawbacks:
1. Ties in ranks occur quite frequently. There may be several respondents with total scores of 0, 1, 2,3,4,5, who cannot be ordered in relation to one another.
2. It does not throw light on the different way in which given scores may be obtained. Different combinations of the score imply differences among individuals who are not revealed by this procedure.
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3. It is not possible to determine whether the scale is unidimensional or multidimensional, i.e., whether the statements are measuring only one property or several properties of an attitude.
4. In this scale, all statements are deemed to be of equal attitude value. This method orders the individuals on the basis of their total scores and not statements.