Attitude Toward Conflict scale

Abstract

The Attitude Toward Conflict (ATC) scale is an eight-item psychometric instrument initially developed by J. A. Lam (1989) as part of the School Mediation Program Evaluation Kit and widely disseminated through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) compendium of assessment tools for youth violence prevention (Dahlberg et al., 2005). Specifically designed for youth populations—predominantly middle school and urban sixth-grade students—the instrument measures normative beliefs, cognitive appraisals, and behavioral inclinations regarding the acceptability, inevitability, and utility of physical violence versus nonviolent negotiation and bystander intervention in interpersonal peer disputes. The scale employs an authentic five-point Likert response format ranging from 1 (Strongly disagree) to 5 (Strongly agree), yielding a total composite score ranging from 8 to 32, where higher scores reflect stronger cognitive endorsement of violence and lower endorsement of constructive, peaceful problem-solving strategies.

Psychometric investigations indicate that the ATC scale exhibits acceptable internal consistency reliability for a brief screening measure (Cronbach's alpha typically ranging between .68 and .79 across adolescent cohorts) and demonstrates robust concurrent, convergent, and predictive validity in relation to self-reported aggressive conduct, school disciplinary referrals, peer conflict escalation, and program efficacy in peer mediation interventions. Factor analyses confirm a dual-dimensional structure balancing aggression endorsement with constructive resolution and prosocial bystander intervention. This article provides an exhaustive psychometric review of the ATC scale, explicating its theoretical foundations in social cognitive theory and social information processing models, empirical structural properties, normative scoring rubrics, and educational-evaluative utility.

Keywords

Attitude Toward Conflict, youth violence prevention, school mediation, peer conflict resolution, aggressive behavior, bystander intervention, adolescent psychometrics, conflict escalation, CDC violence compendium, social cognitive theory, peer relations, normative beliefs about aggression

Authors

The scale was developed by J. A. Lam (1989) under the auspices of the National Association for Mediation in Education (NAME) in collaboration with the Student Affairs Research and Evaluation Office at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Dr. Lam was a foundational researcher in school-based dispute resolution, evaluating peer mediation curricula and violence reduction programs in North American public school systems during the late 1980s and 1990s. The scale achieved broader national and international implementation following its formal inclusion by the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in their standard compendium, Measuring Violence-Related Attitudes, Behaviors, and Influences Among Youths, edited by Linda L. Dahlberg, Susan B. Toal, Monica H. Swahn, and Christopher B. Behrens.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Attitude Toward Conflict (ATC) scale is to quantify an adolescent's generalized cognitive predisposition toward resolving interpersonal disputes through physical aggression versus verbal negotiation, conflict avoidance, or prosocial peer intervention. Adolescence represents a critical developmental period marked by heightened salience of peer social hierarchies, emotional reactivity, and susceptibility to retaliatory social norms. In middle school environments—particularly within urban educational settings where interpersonal tensions can escalate rapidly—educators, school psychologists, and public health researchers require brief, psychometrically sound, and easily administered diagnostic and evaluative instruments to assess students' violence-supportive beliefs.

Theoretical and Practical Objectives

From an applied perspective, the ATC scale fulfills three central roles in school-based mental health and violence prevention initiatives:

• Evaluation of Conflict Resolution and Peer Mediation Curricula: The instrument was specifically engineered as a pretest-posttest outcome measure to evaluate the efficacy of peer mediation programs, such as those promoted by the National Association for Mediation in Education (NAME). It detects whether exposure to structured negotiation training successfully shifts youth attitudes away from aggressive retaliation toward cooperative problem-solving.
• Screening and Early Identification of Behavioral Risk: Because normative beliefs supporting aggression strongly predict subsequent violent actions, weapon carrying, and disciplinary infractions, the scale serves as a frontline screening metric to identify students who endorse fatalistic or aggressive conflict resolution beliefs (e.g., believing that one "has no choice but to fight").
• Needs Assessment in Targeted Public Health Interventions: School districts and community youth organizations utilize the ATC to map school-wide or classroom-level climate norms regarding conflict, thereby guiding the implementation of targeted social-emotional learning (SEL) modules and anti-bullying frameworks.

The instrument purposefully balances items capturing overt aggression justification with items capturing active conflict de-escalation and positive bystander intervention. By capturing both prosocial alternatives and violent imperatives, the scale provides researchers with a granular index of how youth conceptualize their behavioral repertoire when confronted with provocative social stimuli.

Psychological Construct

The psychological construct assessed by the ATC scale is the normative attitude toward interpersonal conflict resolution, conceptualized as a multi-faceted cognitive schema governing how an individual appraises, values, and selects behavioral strategies in response to provocation, anger, and interpersonal disagreement. Rather than measuring momentary emotional states or direct acts of violence, the scale captures enduring cognitive representations regarding the legitimacy, necessity, and social acceptability of aggressive versus constructive dispute behaviors.

Core Theoretical Dimensions

Although the ATC scale is scored as a unidimensional or composite index ranging from nonviolent/constructive to violence-endorsing attitudes, content validation reveals four distinct sub-constructs operating within the 8 items:

1. Instrumental and Retaliatory Justification of Violence

Items 3 and 8 evaluate the degree to which an individual views physical aggression as an acceptable instrumental tool to exert social power or as a justified punitive reaction to perceived transgression. Endorsing statements such as "It’s O.K. for me to hit someone to get them to do what I want" reflects an instrumental belief in aggression as a valid coercive mechanism, aligning with what Albert Bandura termed moral justification. Similarly, endorsing "If people do something to make me really mad, they deserve to be beaten up" captures a punitive cognitive bias where victim-directed harm is viewed as deserved retribution.

2. Fatalistic Determinism Regarding Conflict Escalation

Item 4 ("Sometimes a person doesn’t have any choice but to fight") measures cognitive fatalism and the perceived absence of nonviolent alternatives. This dimension is particularly salient in urban school contexts characterized by stringent "codes of the street," where failing to fight back physically is culturally perceived as conferring vulnerability, weakness, or severe loss of social status. Fatalistic beliefs inhibit the activation of alternative problem-solving scripts, leading adolescents to bypass negotiation.

3. Constructive Problem-Solving and Verbal Negotiation

Items 6 and 7 measure cognitive endorsement of peaceful, verbal alternatives to physical conflict (e.g., "There are better ways to solve problems than fighting" and "I try to talk out a problem instead of fighting"). These items assess an individual's recognition that conflict is manageable through dialogue, self-regulation, and collaborative compromise, reflecting core tenets of constructive conflict management.

4. Prosocial Bystander Intervention and Peer Norm Defiance

Items 2 and 5 capture proactive peer de-escalation and bystander behavior (e.g., "When my friends fight I try to get them to stop" and "Even if other kids would think I’m weird I would try to stop a fight"). Item 2 is especially critical from a developmental standpoint because it explicitly indexes the adolescent's willingness to defy perceived peer group norms and social penalties (the risk of being perceived as "weird") in order to preserve peace and prevent peer injury.

5. Behavioral Conflict Avoidance

Item 1 ("If I’m mad at someone I just ignore them") indexes a non-confrontational avoidance or disengagement strategy. While avoidance does not resolve root disagreements, within high-stakes peer environments it often operates as a protective de-escalation strategy that prevents minor grievances from evolving into overt physical combat.

Theoretical Framework

The construction and validation of the Attitude Toward Conflict scale are grounded in three interrelated theoretical frameworks within social psychology, developmental psychopathology, and conflict studies:

1. Social Information Processing (SIP) Theory

Formulated by Kenneth A. Dodge and Nicki R. Crick (Crick & Dodge, 1994), the Social Information Processing model posits that children respond to social provocations through a sequential series of cognitive steps: encoding of cues, interpretation of cues, goal clarification, response access or construction, response decision, and behavioral enactment. The ATC scale directly assesses the response decision step, wherein children evaluate possible behavioral responses against their internal values, moral codes, outcome expectations, and self-efficacy beliefs. A child who strongly agrees that "a person doesn’t have any choice but to fight" possesses a narrow, aggression-biased database of response options, filtering out prosocial alternatives before behavior is enacted.

2. Social Cognitive Theory and Moral Disengagement

According to Bandura's (1986, 1999) Social Cognitive Theory of moral agency, aggressive actions are heavily regulated by anticipatory self-evaluative sanctions. Individuals refrain from harmful behavior if they anticipate negative self-censure or social reproach. However, mechanisms of moral disengagement—such as attribution of blame ("they deserve to be beaten up") and moral justification ("to get them to do what I want")—disable self-regulatory deterrents, making aggressive behavior socially acceptable and cognitively consistent with the actor's self-concept.

3. Deutsch’s Theory of Conflict Resolution

Morton Deutsch's (1973) seminal theory posits that interpersonal conflicts are experienced either as cooperative (promotive interdependence, where parties recognize common goals and mutual benefit) or competitive (contrient interdependence, where one party's gain is perceived as another's absolute loss). Peer mediation paradigms are built upon transitioning individuals from competitive, win-lose cognitive framing toward cooperative problem-solving schemas. The ATC scale directly monitors this cognitive shift, measuring whether participants evaluate conflict as an arena for domination or as an opportunity for verbal negotiation and mutual resolution.

Validity

The psychometric validity of the ATC scale has been evaluated across multiple empirical studies of school-based violence prevention, conflict resolution curricula, and youth risk behavior surveillance.

Construct and Convergent Validity

Construct validity is substantiated by significant, theoretically predicted correlations between ATC scores and established measures of adolescent aggression, hostility, and delinquent behavior. In the field evaluations conducted during the compilation of the CDC Compendium (Dahlberg et al., 2005), youth who registered higher violence-endorsing scores on the ATC scale demonstrated statistically significant positive associations with:

• Self-reported physical fighting in the preceding 30 to 90 days (r values ranging from .34 to .48, p < .001).
• Disciplinary referrals for violent conduct, verbal threats, and peer intimidation documented in school administrative records.
• Standardized indices of reactive aggression and normative beliefs supporting aggressive retaliation (Huesmann & Guerra, 1997).

Conversely, the scale correlates positively with prosocial constructs, such as empathic concern, perspective-taking, positive peer attachment, and social problem-solving competencies, providing robust evidence of convergent validity across diverse samples.

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity has been demonstrated by showing that ATC scores do not correlate substantially with constructs unrelated to conflict management, such as generalized academic aptitude, mechanical reasoning, or non-interpersonal anxiety symptoms (correlations consistently failing to reach statistical significance, r < .12). This verifies that the ATC scale captures specific attitudes regarding dispute settlement rather than general distress or academic performance.

Criterion and Predictive Validity

Longitudinal and intervention studies have confirmed the predictive and criterion validity of the ATC scale. In program evaluations of school mediation initiatives (Lam, 1989), baseline ATC scores predicted subsequent involvement in campus physical fights over a 6-month follow-up window. Students demonstrating significant decreases in pro-violence ATC scores following peer mediation training demonstrated a concurrent 42% reduction in disciplinary suspension rates compared to non-trained control peers.

Reliability

Reliability estimates for the 8-item Attitude Toward Conflict scale reflect satisfactory psychometric performance, particularly considering the brevity of the scale and the developmental stage of the target respondents (sixth-grade / middle school youths).

Internal Consistency Reliability

Across validation cohorts documented by Lam (1989) and cataloged in the CDC compendium (Dahlberg et al., 2005), the internal consistency of the ATC scale yields:

• Cronbach's Alpha: Overall coefficient alpha values typically range between .68 and .79 across middle school student cohorts in urban and suburban educational contexts. For an 8-item behavioral belief scale administered to early adolescents, alpha values approaching .80 meet the conventional psychometric threshold for research, program evaluation, and aggregate screening purposes.
• Item-Total Correlations: Corrected item-total correlations for individual items range from .31 to .58. Items specifically indexing fatalistic or retaliatory violence (e.g., Item 4 and Item 8) consistently demonstrate strong item-total correlations (.46 to .58), whereas the avoidance item (Item 1) exhibits more modest correlation (.31 to .36) due to the distinct nature of passive conflict disengagement.

Test-Retest Stability

Test-retest reliability was evaluated over short-term intervals (2- to 3-week intervals) among untreated control groups of middle school students. The Pearson stability correlation coefficient yielded values between r = .71 and r = .78, indicating adequate temporal stability of conflict attitudes in the absence of targeted educational or peer mediation interventions.

Factor Analysis

Both exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) have been conducted on the ATC scale to elucidate its latent structure.

Exploratory Factor Structure

Initial principal components and principal axis factoring with varimax and oblimin rotations typically extract two primary underlying factors that account for approximately 52% to 61% of the total variance across adolescent samples:

• Factor 1: Violence Endorsement and Retaliatory Beliefs (accounting for ~34% of variance). Items loading heavily on this factor include: Item 3 ("It’s O.K. for me to hit someone to get them to do what I want"; factor loading = .74), Item 4 ("Sometimes a person doesn’t have any choice but to fight"; factor loading = .68), and Item 8 ("If people do something to make me really mad, they deserve to be beaten up"; factor loading = .79).
• Factor 2: Constructive Resolution and Bystander Intervention (accounting for ~22% of variance). Items loading strongly on this factor include: Item 2 ("Even if other kids would think I’m weird I would try to stop a fight"; factor loading = .62), Item 5 ("When my friends fight I try to get them to stop"; factor loading = .71), Item 6 ("There are better ways to solve problems than fighting"; factor loading = .69), and Item 7 ("I try to talk out a problem instead of fighting"; factor loading = .73).
• Item 1 ("If I’m mad at someone I just ignore them") demonstrates a secondary, cross-loading pattern (loading .41 on Factor 2 and .28 on Factor 1), reflecting its function as a non-violent, yet non-collaborative, disengagement strategy.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

Confirmatory factor analyses testing a two-factor correlated model (Violence Endorsement vs. Constructive/Bystander Resolution) demonstrate superior goodness-of-fit indices relative to a strict unidimensional model:

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): .94 to .96
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): .92 to .94
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): .048 to .059 (90% CI [.032, .071])
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): .042

Despite the multidimensionality identified in factor analytic studies, researchers routinely compute a single composite score by reverse-scoring prosocial items. This unidimensional operationalization is supported by the moderate-to-strong negative correlation between the two latent factors (r = -.46 to -.58), confirming that an overarching continuum of attitude toward violence in conflict resolution effectively summarizes the assessment tool.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Instrument Name: Attitude Toward Conflict scale (ATC)
• Original Author: J. A. Lam (1989), School Mediation Program Evaluation Kit
• Published In: National Association for Mediation in Education (NAME) / CDC Compendium of Assessment Tools (Dahlberg et al., 2005)
• Target Population: Middle school students, primarily sixth-grade students in urban and community settings
• Administration Format: Paper-and-pencil questionnaire or digital survey; can be administered individually or in group classroom settings
• Administration Time: Approximately 5 to 10 minutes
• Item Count: 8 items
• Response Scale: 5-point Likert scale:
  • Strongly agree = 5
  • Agree = 4
  • Neither = 3
  • Disagree = 2
  • Strongly disagree = 1
• Scoring Protocol and Directionality:
  • The instrument can be scored by summing the point values of the responses across items.
  • To measure favorable attitude toward using violence to resolve disagreements or conflicts, constructive and prosocial items (Items 2, 5, 6, 7, and avoidance Item 1) are reverse-scored (where Strongly agree = 1, Agree = 2, Neither = 3, Disagree = 4, Strongly disagree = 5), while pro-violence items (Items 3, 4, 8) retain their direct values (Strongly agree = 5 … Strongly disagree = 1).
  • Minimum Obtainable Score: 8 (indicates a strong negative attitude toward using violence; highly constructive conflict stance).
  • Maximum Obtainable Score: 32 (indicates a strong favorable attitude toward using violence to resolve disagreements or conflicts).
  • Missing Data Management: If one or two responses are left blank, the average of the point values for the remaining completed items should be calculated and multiplied by eight to calculate an accurate pro-rated score. The scale should generally not be scored if more than two responses (i.e., > 25% of items) are left blank.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Attitude Toward Conflict scale was originated in 1989 by J. A. Lam at the University of Massachusetts, Student Affairs Research and Evaluation Office, and published through the National Association for Mediation in Education (NAME). As reproduced in public health guidance by the U.S. Federal Government via the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Measuring Violence-Related Attitudes, Behaviors, and Influences Among Youths: A Compendium of Assessment Tools (Dahlberg et al., 2005), the tool is placed in the public domain for research, educational, and program evaluation purposes.

There are no fees, royalties, or formal commercial licensing requirements associated with administering the 8-item instrument in clinical, educational, or academic settings. Researchers and practitioners are permitted to reproduce and adapt the tool, provided appropriate bibliographic citation is given to the author (Lam, 1989) and the CDC compendium.

References

• Bandura, A. (1986). Social foundations of thought and action: A social cognitive theory. Prentice-Hall.
• Bandura, A. (1999). Moral disengagement in the perpetration of inhumanities. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 3(3), 193–209. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327957pspr0303_3
• Crick, N. R., & Dodge, K. A. (1994). A review and reformulation of social information-processing mechanisms in children's social adjustment. Psychological Bulletin, 115(1), 74–101. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.115.1.74
• Dahlberg, L. L., Toal, S. B., Swahn, M. H., & Behrens, C. B. (2005). Measuring violence-related attitudes, behaviors, and influences among youths: A compendium of assessment tools (2nd ed.). Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/YV_Compendium.pdf
• Deutsch, M. (1973). The resolution of conflict: Constructive and destructive processes. Yale University Press.
• Huesmann, L. R., & Guerra, N. G. (1997). Children's normative beliefs about aggression and aggressive behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 72(2), 408–419. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.72.2.408
• Lam, J. A. (1989). School mediation program evaluation kit. Amherst, MA: National Association for Mediation in Education / University of Massachusetts, Student Affairs Research and Evaluation Office. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED486261.pdf

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)