CONSTRUCTING A METHODOLOGY FOR MEASURING ATTITUDES TOWARDS WAR

Abstract

The study of attitudes towards war has been officially conducted since the beginning of the last century by researchers such as Conrad, Droba and Stagner. In their studies, they focused on studying the attitude towards war of veterans, depending on gender and party affiliation, as well as on the religion and age of the respondents. 
The report examines the development of an appropriate methodology for conducting a specific study, using an existing instrument for measuring attitudes towards waging and participating in military conflicts. Self-assessment questionnaires for determining such attitudes, dating from the beginning of the 20th century to the present, as well as the basic psychological constructs for their construction, are examined. A specific existing instrument is selected, namely The War Attitudes Scale by Dupuy and Cohn, which provides the necessary basis as a factor structure for constructing a questionnaire suitable for the Bulgarian population. 
The reliability achieved for the constructed questionnaire demonstrates good values, as do the factor loadings of the items within the individual subscales. The internal consistency coefficients for each factor and for the scale as a whole provide a basis for reliable results when measuring attitudes toward war and the readiness of the studied social groups to defend their country's territorial integrity. The primary focus is on patriotic attitudes regarding defensive wars. The instrument achieves a satisfactory level of brevity and is suitable for administration across a wide range of social groups to obtain quick results when time is limited, while the selected items preserve the original factor structure of the source instrument.