Measuring the Attitudes of Library School Students toward I n t e l l e c t u a l Freedom, Innovation and Change, Service, Research and Administration and Management by LEE WALTON FINKS, Ph.D. Thesis d i r e c t o r : Professor Ralph Blasingame As attempts are increasingly made to measure the |various aspects of American l i b r a r y science, the need for psychological measures, such as a t t i t u d e s c a l e s, becomes more evident. This research has attempted to develop an instrument which can serve as a valid and r e l i a b l e measure of l i b r a r i a n s ' and l i b r a r y students' a t t i t u d e s toward five issues on which American l i b r a r i es a r e c r i t i c i z e d : i n t e l l e c t u a l freedom, innovation and change, service, research, and administration and management. The instrument is a set of five Likert-type a t t i t u de s c a l e s , one for each of the a t t i t u d e objects. The scales a r e made up of twenty (for three s c a l e s ) or twenty-five ( f o r two scales) statements of opinion with which the subject is asked to agree or disagree on a seven-step s c a l e . These statements of opinion (items) were randomly arranged and combined with t h i r t e e n i r r e l e v a nt items to form a 123-item instrument, plus a covereheet containing directions and a brief demographic questionnaire. The reliability and validity of the scales were established to the investigator's satisfaction. For reliability, three standard techniques, coefficient alpha, splithalf, and test-retest, were used, and with all three, each scale demonstrated reliabilities at or above the criterion level of .8. For validity, each of the five scales was subjected to at least four tests of construct validity, and each scale "passed" at least three of these tests. In addition none of the scales correlated with a measure of verbal ability, and only one (by the slimmest of margins) correlated with a measure of social desirability response sets. In addition to the construction of the instrument, a limited number of assumptions about library education were examined through testing of hypotheses. These hypotheses, which relate essentially to the change of students' attitudes during enrollment in a graduate library school program, were: (1) that the scores of students in their first semester of library school will have more variance than the scores of students in their second or later semester; (2) that the mean of the second (later) group will be significantly higher than that of the first group; and (3) that the mean of the later semester students' scores will have moved in the direction of the faculty members' scores. These hypotheses, designed to test the assumption that the faculty and curriculum of a library education program significantly affect the attitudes uf participating students, were not, in general, tenable. To simplify the very complex results, we might say that jrtudents' attitudes did change, but not very much; that they were not made "firmer" by more exposure to library education; and that to the extent that they did change, they changed in the direction of the faculty who had beex teaching them. The results also showed that for this sample of students, attitudes toward the five issues studied were not strongly favorable.
