Attitudes Toward Animal: Society & Animals Spring 2017

By Dr. G (Carol Glasser)

Students in the Spring 2017 section of Society and Animals (SOC 285W: Special Topics) took a survey measuring their attitudes toward nonhuman animals in the first day of class and again 14 weeks later, toward the end of the semester. 

The survey they took is the Animal Attitudes Scale, a 20-item scale by Herzog, Betchart & Pittman[1] (see Appendix A). The scale has been validated and used successfully in recent studies. The survey asks respondents how much they agree or disagree with various statements regarding attitudes toward animals. In the original scale, some questions are reverse worded though in this report, all reverse worded questions have been recoded and reworded for easy interpretation.[2] Higher scores on these measures indicate pro animal welfare attitudes. In other words, a score of 1 indicates strong disagreement with the statement and low animal welfare attitudes, a score of 3 indicated a neutral stance and a score of 5 indicates strong agreement with the statement and high pro-animal welfare attitudes.
 
In general, students had high pro-animal attitudes with an average score across all items of 4.15 at the start of the class. After 14 weeks, average scores on the Animal Attitudes Scale had increased to 4.48.[3] Overall, average scores increased for almost all questions on the scale, and for only two questions did students, on average, indicate a less positive pro-animal attitude than at the onset of the class.  Below are the average scores of students before and at the end of the class for each question in the survey. The questions are grouped by key topics.

[1] Herzog, H.A., Betchart, N.S, and Pittman, R. (1991) Gender, sex role identity and attitudes toward animals. Anthrozoos,4,184‑191.
[2] Thank you to McKenzie Lindberg, Magdalyn Ries, and Christina Shrestha, students in Dr. Glasser’s SOC 201W Research Methods class, for assistance with data entry.
[3] This report will look only at class averages, not individual scores in order to respect participant anonymity.