An Buridan’s ass between a rock and a hard place: operationalization and measure of ambivalence in humanities. Part 2

Abstract

This article is the second part of the research dedicated to the problem of operationalization and estimation ambivalence in quantitative researches that was published in the previous issue. Ambivalence is defined as a phenomenon when a subject has two different polar estimates towards an object or a situation at the same time. In the first part different methods of ambivalence assessment were mentioned. Ambivalence was represented as an integral index that can be calculated basing on the values of antonymous attitudes (concurrent and dominant). However simplicity of this approach means loss of information, discrepancy between the model and intuitive understanding of ambivalence with different proportions of concurrent and dominant attitudes. Moreover, in most situations a researcher is not interesting in ambivalence itself but in phenomenology of it such as it’s influence in personal traits or possibility of it to mediate or transform correlation between different variables. The study of such phenomena is more informative and full if both variables that represent antonymous attitudes are used as determinants. Furthermore, this approach is applicable not only for linear but also for complex nonlinear and multiplicative determination. This approach to the operationalizing of ambivalence is called functional. To wrap it up, one more approach is relevant in the situations when unipolar scales of semantic differential which have antonymous pairs are used. In this situation, we suggest calculating joint coefficients of correlation between all pairs of the variables and defining significant negative correlation coefficients as parameters that show absence of ambivalence.