Short Forms for Attitude Scales in Social Sciences: The Case of Attitude Towards Capital Punishment

Attitude scales are common in the social sciences but quite often they are very long and hence short forms are needed. Short forms can reduce the fatigue problem and make it possible for other measurements to be included, but short forms must be produced without much sacrifice to reliability and validity. In this paper, capital punishment attitude scales are investigated as a special case. A total of 27 items whose psychometric properties have been well established are used. A simple and direct method of producing short forms is used to produce half (14 items) and quarter (7 items) versions of the original. Both two- and six-point Likert scales are used to investigate the interaction effects between number of item-response option and scale length. Results show that there is no clear difference between the two- and six-point scales in terms of reliabilities, but the six-point scale is preferred in respect of trace information and percentages of variance in the one-factor model, and is closer to normality. In practice, we suggest short forms should always be considered for attitude scales in social services, and more Likert scale points can produce even better short forms. Limitations and further directions are discussed.