The Development and Validation of Vignette-Type Instrument for Measuring Attitude Toward Poverty

This paper has its focus on describing processes involved in the development of a measuring instrument for attitude toward poverty. Infrequent studies in the area of the attitude of young people towards poverty especially in the development of measuring instruments capable of capturing attitude toward poverty in this part of the world occasioned the study. Participants were 200 undergraduate students (133 females and 67 males) randomly selected in a private university in Nigeria. The ages of the participants ranged from 15 to 24 years, with mean age of 17.9 years. A scale tagged- Attitude towards Poverty (ATP) was used to generate data. It has a pool of five vignette-type clusters with four items each generated through a rigorous review of literature. When the data was subjected to a factor analysis, five factors emerged from the vignettes with significant factor loadings ranging from .302 to .888 and communalities ranging from .603 to .848. The ATP showed a Cronbach Alpha of 0.919 and an intrinsic validity of 0.959. The split-half reliability of 0.868 for part A and 0.854 for part B were also obtained for the ATP. The factor analysis indicated that the ATP is a reliable vignette-type instrument for measuring positive or negative attitude toward poverty among undergraduate university students in Nigeria. It was concluded that studies should intensely focus on the attitude of young people toward poverty with the aim of correcting negative attitudes, if any, and encouraging positive attitudes.