Development of a scale to measure attitude of people towards common property resources

Initially a set of thirty statements was prepared to construct the attitude scale with the help of available literature, discussion with subject matter specialists and extension scientists. The editing of statements was done with the help of 14 informal criteria. Consequently, twenty six (26) unambiguous generalized relevant attitude statements were selected for item analysis. All the selected statements were mailed to a group of forty (40) experts for their agreement or disagreement on the statements. Twenty four experts returned these with their ratings. The final selection of the statements constituting the attitude scale was completed with the help of correlational method on the basis of mean difference of high and low group as suggested by Murphy and Likert (1937). The developed attitude scale contains twenty statements (Thirteen positive and seven negative). The scale was found reliable at 1 per cent level of probability with having content validity too.