Measuring Attitudes Towards the Internet: The General Internet Attitude Scale

Abstract

The General Internet Attitude Scale (GIAS) is a questionnaire designed to explore the underlying components of the attitudes of individuals to the Internet, and to measure individuals on these attitude components. Previous Internet attitude research is critiqued for its lack of a clear definition of constructs. GIAS was developed starting from the well-established three-component psychological model of attitude (affect, behavior, cognition) into which applicable statements found in previous Internet attitude measures were fitted. GIAS was developed using an iterative psychometric process with four independent samples (N = 2,200). During iterations, the wordings of the items were refined, and exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses identified four underlying factors in the scale: Internet Affect, Internet Exhilaration, Social Benefit of the Internet, and Internet Detriment, all of which had acceptable internal reliabilities. The final instrument contains 21 items and demonstrates strong reliability achieving an overall Cronbach’s alpha value of 0.85. The behavioral component of the three-factor attitude model could not be replicated, although there was a medium, positive correlation between GIAS and a measure of Internet self-efficacy. Attitude and self-efficacy are important personal constructs and may well contribute to the large variance that usability metrics are known to exhibit.

Notes

¹ These two items proved to be troublesome to the very final analysis, and in Study 4 they were finally deleted.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mary Joyce

Mary Joyce’s research, which arose from her Ph.D studies, is concerned with the measurement of Internet attitudes and Internet self-efficacy and the use of such scales in usability evaluation practice. She is also interested in using these scales to examine demographic differences (e.g. age, gender) in online environments. Dr. Joyce intends to promote GIAS and the ISES through uxp.ie, the User Experience Solutions website.

Jurek Kirakowski

Jurek Kirakowski comes from a practical computer science and psychology background. His specialization is quantitative measurement in human-computer interaction (HCI). Dr. Kirakowski’s research interests continue to be user experience in HCI, as well as the philosophy and methodology of human measurement. Dr. Kirakowski and his research group (PaT) are well known for the development of the Software Usability Measurement Inventory and Website Analysis and Measurement Inventory.