Ambivalence about Social Welfare: An Evaluation of Measurement Approaches
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15763/issn.2374-7781.2008.29.0.109-134Abstract
Research across disciplines, including political science, has embraced the idea that individuals often possess ambivalent attitudes, but there is considerable disagreement about how to measure this phenomenon. Determining an effective way of capturing such phenomena is important to our under-standing of politics and public opinion. The literature offers several meta-attitudinal and operative measures of ambivalence. I discuss strengths and weaknesses of each of these approaches and con-duct a test of the relative construct validity of two meta-attitudinal and two operative measures of social welfare ambivalence using data from a statewide survey of Florida residents in 2004. The findings suggest that one of the operative measures that forces respondents to rate their positive and negative feelings separately performs better than any of the other approaches currently offered.References
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