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THE APPLICATION OF A FACTOR ANALYSIS TO VERIFY FACTOR STRUCTURE OF MODIFIED SEMANTIC DIFFERENTIAL FOR MEASURING STUDENTS’ ATTITUDES
Abstract
This paper describes the use of a factor analysis to verify the factor structure of the semantic differential for measuring university students’ attitudes in various sociocultural environments. Specifically, the study focuses on the attitudes of students from Palacky University, Olomouc and students from the University of Rzeszow towards concepts related to their pre-graduate teacher training. The semantic differential method is a relatively frequent method used to measure attitudes in the Czech Republic and abroad in, among other things, the area of education from the educational and psychological perspectives. It is obvious, however, that ready-made semantic differential scales are not always adequately transferrable into different sociocultural environments. This can cause major discrepancies in comparing the attitudes of culturally different groups of respondents using the same measuring tool. In this paper, an explorative factor analysis is used to optimize the ATER two-factor semantic differential (standardized for the Czech population) used to measure the attitudes of Polish students. The factor analysis was performed using the STATISTICA 12 statistical package. Several methods of factor extraction and rotation were used. Although the ATER semantic differential had been consulted with and translated by a native Pole, the factor structure of Polish university students differs from the factor structure of Czech university students. Applying the semantic differential method for the assessment factor and energy factor without selecting optimum scales would cause misinterpretations. Non-optimized scales would not measure the anticipated dimensions of the semantic differential.
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