ABSTRACT
Because of the promising results from the adults' C-Scale, Insel and Wilson (1971) decided to construct a children's version. This was an obvious step since the C-Scale approach would appear to have even greater advantages in the case of children; less concentration and verbal sophistication being required for meaningful responses to the short items. Moreover, there is clearly a need for a satisfactory measure of social attitudes in children. A number of reliable tests are available for the assessment of intelligence and personality, but no real attempt has been made to tackle the problem of assessing children's attitudes. The neglect of this area of study seems surprising in view of the importance attached to the stages of childhood and adolescence in the development of attitudes. In this connection, Wilson and Patterson (1970) suggested that “conservatism” reflects the internalization of “parental” prohibitions. A children's attitude measure would thus seem useful as a technique for studying attitude formation, the relationship of attitudes to personality traits at different stages of development, and the effects of exposure to various family and social influences.
