ABSTRACT
Potentially a source of great confusion for non-experts in attitudinal research is the fact that different people use terms such as "attitudes," "beliefs," and "values" in different ways. To the non-expert, attitudinal research appears to have the potential of providing a great deal of useful information to policymakers concerned with material and energy resources. Policymakers are likely to be interested not only in acquiring information regarding individual attributes but also in exploring the inter-relationships between these attributes and the ways in which they relate to underlying human values. One purpose is for policymakers to obtain some understanding of why people think and act in the ways they do and, perhaps, of how they might be influenced to act differently; another purpose is to develop models that can be used to predict how the attributes might change in the future. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
