Review of Patterns of belief and action.

Abstract

Reviews the book, Patterns of Belief and Action by S. L. Sutherland (1981). Patterns of Belief and Action is a study of student activism at the University of Alberta in 1970. A stratified random sample of 1200 students was selected and 80% of them actually completed an extensive battery of questionnaires and attitude scales. Included in the sample were students in all years, both undergraduate and graduate, and in most of the University Acuities. Among the wide variety of measures used were items on childhood background, demographic information, various attitude scales, personality inventories and a mental health index. Sutherland offers a convincing rationale for including each of the scales. Both the measures developed specifically for this investigation and those that already existed were psychometrically refined. Factor and item analyses were used to reduce each measure to an internally consistent, brief form. As a result, many of the scales are in the 5-8 item range. Despite their brevity, almost all have good psychometric properties.