Darryl Laws

 The following questionnaire will require approximately twenty minutes to complete. There is no compensation for responding nor is there any known risk. In order to ensure that all information will remain confidential, please do not include your name. Copies of the project will be provided to my Pepperdine University advisors David Smith, PhD and Richard Walton, PhD. 

If you choose to participate in this project, please answer all questions as honestly as possible and return the completed questionnaires promptly <insert method of return, such as or provided stamped envelope. Participation is strictly voluntary and you may refuse to participate at any time. 

Justification for the selection of the use of a Likert Scale. Likert scale measurements of human attitude are the examples of scales in psychometrics used widely in the social science and educational research spaces. The Likert scale was devised in order to measure attitude in a scientifically accepted and validated manner in 1932. An attitude can be defined as preferential ways of behaving and or  reacting in a specific circumstance rooted in relatively enduring organization of belief and ideas (around an object, a subject or a concept) acquired through social interactions. Thinking (cognition), feeling (affective) and action (psychomotor) all together in various combinations or permutations constitute delivery of attitude in a specified condition (Joshi, Kale, Chandel, 2015). The Likert Scale provides a means to quantify these subjective preferential thinking, feeling and action in a validated and reliable manner. 

The construct of the Likert scale is a set of statements (items) offered for a real or hypothetical situation under study. Participants are asked to show their level of agreement (from strongly disagree to strongly agree) with the given statement (items) on a metric scale. All the statements in combination reveal the specific dimension of the attitude towards the issue, hence, necessarily inter-linked with each other. Interpretation with Likert scale largely depends upon these diversities, symmetric versus asymmetric Likert scale. If the position of neutrality (I don't know) lies exactly in between two extremes of strongly disagree (SD) to strongly agree (SA), it provides independence to a participant to choose any response in a balanced and symmetric way in either directions. This construction is known as symmetric scale. On the other hand, asymmetric Likert scale offer less choices on one side of neutrality (average) as compared to other side. Asymmetric scale in some cases also indicates forced choices where there is no perceived value of indifference / neutrality of the researcher. 

Darryl Laws