Attitudes Toward Illegal Aliens: The Reliability and Validity of a Likert-Type Scale.

The article examines attitudes toward illegal aliens in the United States using a Likert-type scale in three phases. For several decades, the issue of illegal immigration has been a source of conflict and contention in the United States. It has been estimated that the number of illegal aliens entering the country is about 500,000 each year. The debate over the presence of illegal aliens continues. In an increasingly turbulent and politically unstable world, people will seek, legally or illegally, to improve the fortunes of themselves and their families. To measure attitudes toward illegal immigrants, the authors developed a Likert-type scale in three phases: item selection, internal homogeneity, and construct validity. The three phases of the research yielded a unidimensional scale of acceptable homogeneity. More broadly, we linked attitudes toward illegal aliens to factors derived from the general literature on prejudice. The respondents who displayed negative attitudes toward illegal aliens were generally male, authoritarian, and disapproving of other minorities as well.