ABSTRACT
I started with a measure of explicit attitudes, as Allport would have liked, to provide a measure of conscious predisposition. In order to assess the explicit attitudes towards people from different ethnic backgrounds my team and I developed two separate measures. One was a computerised Likert Scale and the second was what is called a ‘Feeling Thermometer’ to assess explicit ‘feelings’ towards White and non-White (or Minority Ethnic) people. The Likert Scale (see Figure 12.1) gives a very simple measure of explicit attitude. I could not help noticing that the scale that we finally agreed on had that very odd lexicon of ‘White’ and ‘non-White’; it almost sounded discriminatory to begin with, as if it defined the whole diversity of mankind (and womankind) with the label of not being something, but my team argued strongly that this was the way to start and that people who are from ethnically diverse backgrounds are often seen as being ‘non-White’, from a White European point of view. If ‘non-White’ does hint at a vague and slightly sinister residual category then presumably this should be picked up in the self-report attitudes.
