Content area
Abstract
Since the early twentieth century, attitude research in general has, indisputably, spread far beyond individual countries, and there are, presumably, no continents, from Europe through Africa, Asia and Australia to America, where attitude studies are not prevalent these days. Evidently, as circumstances vary from continent to continent, from country to country, attitudes can be analyzed from various perspectives since, in addition to its global prevalence, attitude measurement has permeated research also in various disciplines to a considerable extent, including, among other things, formal sciences, cognitive sciences, life sciences as well as social sciences. Overall, due to this omnipresent nature of attitude research, an infinite number and variety of attitude studies exists based on the particular models and paradigms the individual scientific fields offer, adjusting, naturally, to individual particularities emerging from the diversities of the various local contexts.
As a matter of fact, in many of the different scientific fields mentioned above, projects whose main aim is to investigate attitudes may be combined in an interdisciplinary manner since, in the majority of the cases, research concerning attitudes overlaps even beyond the frameworks of these individual disciplines. For example, regarding social sciences, attitude research ranges from sociology through social psychology to various subfields of linguistics. In fact, this simultaneous presence in multiple domains might appear to evoke debates in several issues related to attitudes such as, among other things, how to define the concept of attitude unambiguously. Nevertheless, in this respect, at least with regard to social sciences, there still exists a very straightforward and very coherent view concerning the definition of the concept of attitude, namely, attitudes, in general, are regarded as positive or negative evaluations of different issues. This unanimity among social scientists concerning main issues of attitude research, despite potential controversies caused by its interdisciplinarity, might be another reason for the prevalence of attitude studies that have been conducted in the various scientific fields in the last and in the present century as well.
Despite the great degree of agreement among social sciences in terms of several vital issues, for example, the definition of attitude, the question of attitude measurement seems to be one of the subject matters where the different fields of social sciences are unable to compromise as far as the best attitude measurement technique is concerned. Although different influential tendencies exist, i.e. attitudes can be examined with the help of direct or indirect techniques as well, each field favors its own approaches and techniques allowing researchers of the individual fields to focus on the investigation of attitudes from a specific perspective of their own discipline. In some cases, though, methods from one field are integrated into the data collection of another field, enabling researchers to explore attitudes from more different aspects than applying a single technique would permit. As a consequence, the great variety of different methods that exist currently in attitude research as well as the combination of the various techniques across the different disciplines provides a further reason for the existence of the immense number of attitude studies.
