Applying a Consistency Coefficient Methodology to General and Specific Attitudes Towards Automated Devices

摘要

The current study addresses two main goals: a) to present a new methodological approach thatfeatures within-participants consistency coefficients as a means to analyse data; and b) to showhow this new methodology can generate findings otherwise impossible to detect. There have beenvery few studies that have looked at attitudes towards automation, and none that we know of thathave looked at the consistency of attitudes towards automation. Participants rated their attitudestowards 15 different common household automated devices across two identical blocks in orderto generate a consistency coefficient. They then rated their attitudes towards automation ingeneral. The results showed that general and specific attitudes were moderately high, theconsistency of attitudes towards specific types of automated devices was moderate at best, andthat there was a correlation between the consistency of the specific attitudes and general attitudes.This correlation was stronger for female participants compared to male participants. We discussmethodological implications of these findings.