Measuring Attitudes Towards the Internet: The General Internet Attitude Scale

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.