Consensus, Attitudes and Guttman Scales

Résumé

Conventional techniques of attitude scaling, derived from Likert and Thurstone, are psychometric in approach and focus on differences of attitudes between individuals. Their procedures exclude many real attitudinal propositions including those widely or narrowly shared among people discussing a given topic. The Guttman technique is a weaker psychometric instrument, but can explore the consensual aspect of attitudes, and thus has an affinity with social representations. This is discussed both theoretically and with reference to UK public opinion data concerning consensual and minority views towards nuclear weapons in the 1980's