GROUP MEMBERSHIP SALIENCE DURING CONTACT SCALE
(MEASURE 2)
When communicating with your grandparent:
1.How aware are you of the age difference between
you and this grandparent?
2.How much do you think about this grandparent’s
age?3.How much does the age difference between you and
this grandparent matter?
4.To what extent is this grandparent typical of older
people (people over 65)?
Scored from: 1 5not at all to 75very.
Note. Reproduced with permission.
Measuring Attitudes Towards Outgroups
Variable
We now turn our attention to the assessment of the main outcome variable concerning contact theory, attitudes
towards outgroups. Psychologists have long been interested in both defining the attitude construct (e.g.,
Thurstone, 1931 ) and in developing ways to measure it (e.g., Bogardus, 1925 ;Likert, 1932 ). In this section we
investigate the psychometric properties of two popular measures typically used to study outgroup attitudes in
research on intergroup contact: the feeling thermometer (see Converse et al., 1980 ) and the General Evaluation
Scale ( Wright et al., 1997 ). Before proceeding, however, it is important to clarify what we mean by an attitude .
Attitudes can have cognitive, affective, or behavioral components. In this chapter, we focus on the affective com-
ponent of attitudes. For the purposes of this chapter, we will define attitude as a positive or negative (i.e.,
valenced) evaluation of an entity (in our case, a social group), one that can also vary in extremity ( Eagly &
Chaiken, 1993 ). Given this definition, our attitude measures must be able to catch both the valence and extremity
of the attitude held towards the social group.
Feeling Thermometer (FT)
(Converse et al., 1980 ).
Description
The FT has been a mainstay of many studies investigating attitudes towards a variety of social groups. The FT
works by asking participants to rate a target group on a thermometer that typically runs from 0 to 100 degrees
(though feeling thermometers that use 10-points are not uncommon; e.g., De Tezanos-Pinto, Bratt, & Brown,
2010 ). Ratings that fall between 51 and 100 ‘degrees’ are indicative of ‘warmer’ or more favorable attitudes
towards the target group, while ratings that fall between 49 and 0 ‘degrees’ are taken to indicate progressively
‘colder’ or more negative attitudes. Neutral attitudes are indicated by rating the group at 50 ‘degrees’. Often a
picture of a thermometer is provided with the question to aid interpretation. Thus, the feeling thermometer ade-
quately allows for the expression of both attitude valence (cold, neutral, warm) and extremity (i.e., a score of 81
represents a ‘warmer’ or more ‘favorable’ attitude than does a rating of 63).
Samples
Feeling thermometers first appeared in the 1964 round of the American National Election Study (see Converse
et al., 1980 ) asking about respondents’ attitudes towards a number of groups (e.g., from farmers to conservatives
to big businesses). Since its introduction, the feeling thermometer has been used extensively in politics (e.g.,
Conover & Feldman, 1981 ), medicine (e.g., Juniper et al., 1996 ), and aggression studies (e.g., Uhlmann &
Swanson, 2004 ) as a measure of attitudes.
In social psychology, the feeling thermometer has been successfully used with young participants (e.g.,
Mage513.8 years, De Tezanos-Pinto et al., 2010 ), student samples (e.g., Mage520 years, Schmid, Hewstone,
Tausch, Cairns, & Hughes, 2009 ), as well as adult samples (e.g., Mage545.27 years, Tausch et al., 2010 , Study 2).
In addition to American samples, the feeling thermometer has been used in a wide range of national contexts,
including South Africa ( Lolliot, 2013 ), Cyprus ( Tausch et al., 2010 , Study 1), Northern Ireland ( Tausch et al., 2010 ,
Studies 2 and 4), Norway ( De Tezanos-Pinto et al., 2010 ), and Canada ( Haddock, Zanna, & Esses, 1993 ).674 23. MEASURES OF INTERGROUP CONTACT
VI. SOCIOCULTURAL INTERACTION AND CONFLICT