ncidence of agreement with items regardless of the content. The allocation of the positive and negative (reversed) items onto the scale was randomised so that there was no fixed ordering of the items. ProcedureThe participants were asked whether or not they supported the recent fuel protests and this was recorded on their answer sheet. If the quota for that attitude group was already reached they were thanked but were not used further. The participants utilised were asked to complete the scale and thanked upon completion. Their initials were marked on their scale so that they could be recontacted at a later date. Their agreement scores were then inputted into SPSS for analysis. A scale reliability analysis was run on the results and data obtained for the item means, item standard deviations, inter-item correlations (Pearsons) and the scale statistics. Item analysis was then carried out in order to reduce the number of items and refine the scale. Firstly, each of the item means were analysed, any item which had a mean outside of the range 2.5 - 3.5 was removed as these items were not efficiently discriminating between the two criterion groups The item means should lie within this range as one group should be scoring highly on each item while the other should obtain low scores on each item. Secondly, the standard deviations of each item was analysed and any that appeared to be different from the majority were removed. Thirdly, the inter-item correlations (Pearsons correlation coefficients) were analysed, any items which had a relationship of less than 0.5 (Pearsons r) with the majority of the other items were removed as this implies that they are not measuring the same construct as the majority. Next, the effect that each of the items had on the scale variance was considered. If an item radically effects the variation in the scale then it was deleted. The corrected Item-Total Correlation was then considered; if any item correlated with t...
