Social psychological attitudes are perhaps one of the most important determinants of society in that it is the individuals attitude that motivates his or her behaviour. As Rajecki (1990) summed up this conception: ...attitude is seen as the cause and behaviour is seen as the effect. (Rajecki, 1990, p.4). Given consideration, it is easy to see that this is in fact the case; for example, why do people aspire to an education? The reason for this is that they perceive an education to be a positive thing and therefore as something to be desired. There are many words which are variations of attitude such as beliefs, perceptions, convictions, judgements and opinions. Every day we are forming attitudes and acting according to these attitudes and so it becomes clear that attitudes are the factors underpinning everyday life. Allport (1935) defined attitudes as ... a mental neural stateof readiness, organised through experience, exerting a directive or dynamic influence upon the individuals response to all objects and situations with which it is related (Rajecki, 1990, p.4). Attitudes are normally measured through the use of scales such as Thurstones equal appearing interval scale and Likerts(1932) summated rating scale. The Likert scale is perhaps one of the most widely used scale in attitude measurement (Dyer, 1995). Unlike the other scales, the Likert scale employs only monotone items which are either favourable or unfavourable. Respondents have to indcate their level of agreement with a list of these monotone items on a scale from one to five. The answer format is normally presented in the following order: strongly agree, agree, undecided, disagree, strongly disagree (See App1, Figure 1 for example). Each of these answers is assigned a score, for example, strongly agree attains a score of 1.One of the advantages of this type of response set is that, not only does it indicate the respondents attitude, also it indicates the strength of that re...
