Attitude Survey Paper
Ashley Smith
Psych 475
August 8th, 2012 John Papazafiropoulos Attitude Survey Paper
In the United States it is important to be able to understand the general populations attitudes on different subjects that are important or items that are on the market. In psychology attitude surveys are used to gather a sense of individuals attitudes while being able to turn the results into empirical evidence to back up the theory or question that is at hand. A attitude can affect different aspects of a persons thought and behavior process such as, their cognitive thinking, emotional reaction, and physical behaviors (Hogan, 2007). My survey was designed using the SERVQUAL approach to developing a attitude assessment. I developed this survey to asses and understand how students of The University of Phoenix online campus feel about their educational experience upon their graduation from the program. This survey could help to fix different issues in communications and staffing process for future students allowing for better learning experiences and more enrollments. This paper will examine the development of my survey, administration process, scoring of the surveys and the interpretation of the scores. I will also describe issues I had while designing the survey.
Survey Design I designed this survey knowing that my participants would be UOP online campus students who are graduating from their programs. The perfect participants for my survey would be students who had at least completed two years with UOP. What I would be measuring in particular is the attitudes towards every aspect of The University of Phoenix and how likely they would be to recommend the school to others. I would have this survey be a pop up on their sign in screen during the last two weeks of their last class so that every time they log on they see it right away. Ideally, this survey would only take 2-3 minutes at most because I would want to make sure the students don't quit in the middle because it takes too long. I used the likert scale in my survey because I felt as though it would be the easiest way to compile the information I needed. The possible answers range from strongly agree to strongly disagree with neutral in the middle in case the student is impartial. The numerical scores for each question range from-2 to +2. Along with designing a survey it was equally important to design a score report so that at the end the results can easily be compiled and interpreted.
Administration, scoring and interpreting results It is vital that the survey is administered by personal rather then teachers from their last class because it could be possible that the results would be skewed because the student feels as though the teacher may find out their answers and it can affect their grades. When it does to the scoring of the survey the lower the score the lower the satisfaction and the higher the score the higher the level of satisfaction is. While designing the survey I made sure that every unfavorable answer of strongly disagree corresponded with a negative feeling towards the students experience. To make sure the scores are interpreted correctly it is important to try out the questions on a large scale of students to see if there is a trend in answering negatively to one question compared to another so that when the raw scores come in that can be accounted for.
Issues with survey development
A SERVQUAL designed attitude survey is generally used to put a number to the level of service and satisfaction that someone receives (Gob, 2007). The main purpose of any attitude survey seems to be to examine perceptions, expectations and identify the gaps between the two. My biggest struggle was to figure out how to word questions to address those two important components without sounding repetitive and keeping my survey short.
In conclusion, my attitude survey was designed with many of the different aspects of attitude surveys in mind. I made sure it followed the Likert scale because I feel as though that design would be the easiest to interpret and to keep the scores as accurate as possible so the end result would showcase how these students truly felt about their experiences. I also made sure the questions touched upon the cognitive factors, emotional responses, and physical behaviors that the students experience as a result of their level of satisfaction with UOP.

References
Gob, R. (2007). Ordinal methodology in the analysis of Likert scales. Quality & Quantity, 41(5),601-626. Retrieved August 8th 2012, from SocINDEX with Full Text database.
Hogan, T.P. (2007). Psychological testing: A practical introduction (2nd ed.). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.