ABSTRACT
Multi-item scales are preferred for assessing people’s attitudes because they are more reliable than single questions which are designed to assess the same attitude. Such scales require the creation of a large number of items which have to be evaluated on a reasonable sample of people before they are used in research. You should never devise a set of questions to measure an attitude and use it without having conducted an analysis of the items to see whether they do form a scale. The most popular scale at present is the Likert scale. Psychologists also use a number of other means to assess what people think of aspects of their lives: in particular, what such things mean to people.
