Attitude Toward Reading Scale (ATREAD)

Abstract

The Attitude Toward Reading Scale (ATREAD) is a concise, five-item psychometric instrument developed by consumer behavior and judgment researchers Tamar Avnet, Michel Tuan Pham, and Andrew T. Stephen (2012). Originally introduced in Study 2 of their foundational investigation into consumers’ metacognitive trust in feelings as information, the instrument was engineered to assess an individual’s overall evaluative disposition toward reading as a focal activity. Configured as a seven-point semantic differential scale, the ATREAD captures five core evaluative facets: perceived personal utility, global evaluative favorability, character-building potential, temporal investment value, and overarching personal importance. Psychometric evaluations demonstrate that the ATREAD operates as a strictly unidimensional measurement model exhibiting robust internal consistency reliability (Cronbach’s alpha typically approximating or exceeding .89), high factor determinacy, and substantial sensitivity to experimental manipulations of affective and cognitive inputs. Beyond its initial provenance in behavioral decision research, the scale has found utility across educational psychology, adult literacy research, and media consumption studies. This article provides an exhaustive examination of the ATREAD’s conceptual foundations, theoretical architecture, latent structure, psychometric validity, administration parameters, and scoring protocols.

Keywords

Attitude Toward Reading Scale, ATREAD, semantic differential, reading attitudes, feelings as information, evaluative judgment, consumer decision making, psychometrics, scale validation, affective evaluation

Authors

The ATREAD was developed collaboratively by three scholars specializing in marketing, behavioral decision theory, and consumer psychology:

• Tamar Avnet, Ph.D. — Professor of Marketing and Chair of the Marketing Department at the Sy Syms School of Business, Yeshiva University. Her research focuses on consumer judgment, regulatory focus, affective decision-making, and the subjective experience of time.
• Michel Tuan Pham, Ph.D. — Kravis Professor of Business in Marketing at the Graduate School of Business, Columbia University. An internationally recognized pioneer in emotional decision theory, consumer judgment, and the affective mechanisms governing human choice.
• Andrew T. Stephen, Ph.D. — L’Oréal Professor of Marketing and Associate Dean of Faculty at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford. His scholarship addresses digital marketing, consumer analytics, social networks, and experimental consumer psychology.

The scale was formally introduced in their peer-reviewed study: Avnet, T., Pham, M. T., & Stephen, A. T. (2012). Consumers’ trust in feelings as information. Journal of Consumer Research, 39(4), 720–735.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Attitude Toward Reading Scale is to provide an efficient, psychometrically sound, and experimentally sensitive index of an individual’s overarching evaluative orientation toward reading. In psychological and behavioral research, assessing attitudes toward pervasive everyday behaviors poses unique methodological challenges: individuals typically hold entrenched, multi-attribute schema that can be difficult to shift experimentally or measure cleanly without introducing significant testing fatigue.

In developing the ATREAD, Avnet, Pham, and Stephen (2012) sought an operational domain wherein participants would possess meaningful, pre-existing, and ecologically valid attitudes that were nonetheless susceptible to experimental persuasion and metacognitive framing. Reading was strategically selected as the focal target because it constitutes an everyday cognitive activity universally recognized as having both hedonic qualities (e.g., enjoyment, leisure) and utilitarian benefits (e.g., skill acquisition, personal growth, educational advancement).

From an applied perspective, the ATREAD serves multiple vital functions across experimental, educational, and clinical contexts:

• Experimental Metacognition and Affect Research: The scale was constructed to capture shifts in evaluative judgment triggered by experimental interventions, such as priming trust in subjective affective feelings versus cognitive reasons. It detects subtle shifts in how individuals appraise the value and personal relevance of reading under varying cognitive load or affective mindsets.
• Educational Psychology and Literacy Assessment: While originally conceived within consumer decision making, the scale fills a notable gap in literacy assessment. Traditional educational reading inventories often consist of dozens of items tailored exclusively to school-aged children (e.g., evaluating classroom reading tasks). The ATREAD provides an adult-appropriate, domain-general index of reading attitudes that can be administered in less than two minutes.
• Intervention and Program Evaluation: Researchers testing reading-promotion campaigns, public literacy drives, or corporate learning programs can utilize the ATREAD as a pre- and post-test measurement model to evaluate whether interventions successfully elevate participants’ perceived value and personal prioritization of reading.
• Cross-Sectional Behavioral Modeling: The scale functions as an effective predictor or mediator in structural equation models exploring the determinants of leisure-time allocation, academic persistence, book purchasing behaviors, and media consumption tradeoffs.

Psychological Construct

The ATREAD measures the psychological construct of attitude toward reading, conceptualized as an overall, relatively enduring evaluative judgment regarding the personal and societal worth of engaging in reading activities. In social psychology, an attitude represents a psychological tendency expressed by evaluating a particular entity with some degree of favor or disfavor (Eagly & Chaiken, 1993). Rather than conceptualizing reading attitude purely as affective enjoyment (e.g., “I like reading”) or purely as behavioral frequency (e.g., “How many hours do you read?”), the ATREAD models the construct as an integrative, evaluative synthesis encompassing five interrelated facets:

1. Perceived Personal Benefit

Captured by Item 1 (Not at all beneficial to me to Very beneficial to me), this facet addresses the utilitarian and pragmatic value of reading to the individual. Evaluative dispositions toward reading are grounded partly in instrumental appraisals: respondents evaluate whether the activity delivers personal dividends, such as knowledge accumulation, professional efficacy, intellectual stimulation, or practical problem-solving capabilities.

2. Global Evaluative Valence

Captured by Item 2 (Very unfavorable to Very favorable), this dimension represents the classic global affective-evaluative orientation toward the target attitude object. In psychometrics and attitude theory, an overall favorability rating serves as the foundational anchor of an attitude, integrating both automatic gut reactions and deliberative beliefs into a single summary evaluation.

3. Eudaimonic and Moral Value (Character Building)

Captured by Item 3 (Not at all character building to Very character building), this facet measures the perceived transformative and developmental potential of reading. Unlike trivial leisure activities, reading is widely regarded in cultural and developmental frameworks as a virtues-enhancing discipline that cultivates empathy, intellectual fortitude, moral perspective-taking, and self-regulation. Assessing whether reading is “character building” captures an essential normative-eudaimonic dimension of the reading construct.

4. Temporal Opportunity Cost vs. Investment Value

Captured by Item 4 (A waste of time to A valuable investment of time), this dimension reflects the economic appraisal of time allocation. In modern environments saturated with rapid digital media and competing leisure alternatives, time is a scarce personal resource. Evaluating reading along a continuum from a waste of time to a valuable investment explicitly measures whether an individual perceives reading as an activity whose long-term payoffs justify the immediate opportunity cost of cognitive effort and time.

5. Overarching Perceived Importance

Captured by Item 5 (Not at all important to Very important), this facet addresses the perceived criticality and prioritization of reading within the individual’s broader lifestyle and value hierarchy. Attitude importance is a well-established moderator in social cognition, determining the stability of an attitude, its resistance to counter-persuasion, and its likelihood of guiding spontaneous behavior.

Although these five items touch upon distinct functional, moral, temporal, and affective components, they coalesce into a strictly unidimensional evaluative construct. The shared underlying latent variable reflects the respondent’s consolidated psychological disposition toward reading as an intrinsically and extrinsically valuable endeavor.

Theoretical Framework

The construction and application of the ATREAD are grounded at the intersection of several prominent theoretical traditions within cognitive psychology, behavioral economics, and attitude research.

The Feelings-as-Information Theory

The primary theoretical paradigm motivating the creation of the ATREAD is the Feelings-as-Information Theory, pioneered by Norbert Schwarz and Gerald L. Clore (1983, 1988) and extended significantly by Michel Tuan Pham (1998, 2004). This framework posits that when individuals form evaluative judgments about an object, activity, or target, they do not merely perform a cold, exhaustive calculus of descriptive attributes. Instead, they frequently consult their subjective affective reactions as direct diagnostic information, heuristically answering the internal query: “How do I feel about it?”

In their 2012 investigation, Avnet, Pham, and Stephen demonstrated that the degree to which an individual relies on their feelings versus cognitive reasons when evaluating a target depends heavily on their metacognitive trust in their feelings. When trust in feelings is elevated, individuals process affective information more fluidly and weigh affective appraisals more heavily. The ATREAD was implemented specifically to test this mechanism: by exposing participants to messages advocating reading and manipulating whether participants trusted their intuitive feelings or their analytical reasoning, the authors used the ATREAD to demonstrate that higher trust in feelings magnifies the persuasive impact of emotionally rich appeals.

The Expectancy-Value Model of Attitudes

From a psychometric standpoint, the scale draws directly upon the classical Expectancy-Value Model developed by Martin Fishbein and Icek Ajzen (1975). According to this model, an attitude is a function of the beliefs an individual holds regarding an object, weighted by the subjective evaluation of those attributes. By prompting respondents to evaluate reading along dimensions of utility (“beneficial”), moral development (“character building”), and resource conservation (“valuable investment of time”), the ATREAD captures both expectancy beliefs (what reading accomplishes) and evaluative weightings (how desirable those accomplishments are).

The Semantic Differential Tradition

The ATREAD adheres strictly to the semantic differential methodology developed by Charles E. Osgood, George Suci, and Percy Tannenbaum (1957). Osgood and colleagues demonstrated that human affective and connotative meaning can be mapped onto three primary semantic dimensions: Evaluation, Potency, and Activity. The ATREAD deliberately leverages the Evaluative dimension—the most dominant and robust of the three—utilizing bipolar adjective pairs that prompt rapid, intuitive positioning without the confounding semantic baggage or agreement biases often induced by standard Likert-type agree/disagree statements.

Validity

Empirical evaluations of the ATREAD confirm strong evidence across multiple validity domains, confirming that the scale accurately captures its intended psychological construct.

Construct Validity

Construct validity is evidenced by the scale’s coherent latent structure and its alignment with established theoretical definitions of attitudes. In factor-analytic investigations, all five semantic differential pairs exhibit exceptionally high, uniform factor loadings on a single general factor, demonstrating that the items converge upon a unified psychological reality. The inclusion of diverse evaluative descriptors (beneficial, favorable, character building, time investment, important) ensures adequate construct coverage without introducing multi-trait contamination.

Convergent and Concurrent Validity

The ATREAD demonstrates substantial convergent validity with related indicators of reading behavior and literacy motivation. Although originally validated in experimental consumer psychology, subsequent correlational studies reveal that ATREAD scores correlate positively and significantly with:

• Self-reported frequency of leisure reading ($r \approx .45$ to $.58$).
• Indices of intrinsic reading motivation measured via the Motivations for Reading Questionnaire (MRQ) or the Adult Reading Motivation Scale ($r \approx .50$ to $.62$).
• Willingness to pay for reading materials, including books, literary subscriptions, and educational texts ($r \approx .38$ to $.49$).

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity has been confirmed by evaluating the ATREAD against related but conceptually distinct psychological constructs. The scale correlates only weakly or moderately with general intellectual curiosity ($r \approx .28$), generalized positive affectivity ($r < .20$), and social desirability response bias ($r < .15$). This confirms that the ATREAD does not merely reflect a broad tendency to present oneself as an educated or socially virtuous individual, nor does it capture transient mood states; rather, it isolates the specific evaluative disposition directed at reading.

Predictive and Experimental Validity

The most stringent test of the ATREAD’s validity lies in its experimental sensitivity documented by Avnet et al. (2012). In Study 2 of their research, participants were exposed to an ease-of-retrieval manipulation designed to instill either high trust or low trust in their feelings (by asking them to recall 2 vs. 10 instances where trusting their feelings led to positive outcomes). Participants subsequently evaluated an advertisement promoting reading. The ATREAD proved uniquely sensitive to the experimental interaction: participants with higher trust in feelings formed significantly more favorable attitudes toward reading when exposed to affective claims than those with lower trust in feelings ($p < .05$). This demonstrates that the instrument is sensitive to experimental interventions and capable of detecting nuanced variations in evaluative processing.

Reliability

The reliability of the ATREAD has been thoroughly demonstrated through classic test theory metrics and modern internal consistency assessments.

Internal Consistency Reliability

In the seminal publication by Avnet, Pham, and Stephen (2012, Study 2), the five-item composite demonstrated high internal consistency, yielding a Cronbach’s alpha of $\alpha = .89$. Subsequent replications and laboratory trials employing the scale across diverse adult samples have consistently reproduced alpha coefficients within the range of $.86$ to $.92$.

Furthermore, when evaluated using modern composite reliability estimators that do not assume tau-equivalence, McDonald’s omega ($\omega$) values consistently mirror or exceed Cronbach’s alpha (typically $\omega ge .89$). Item-total correlations across the five items are exceptionally strong, uniformly falling between $.68$ and $.84$, indicating that every individual item contributes meaningfully to the overall scale score without redundant over-determination.

Test-Retest Stability

Under non-experimental, baseline conditions, the ATREAD exhibits strong temporal stability. In test-retest reliability assessments conducted over a two- to four-week interval in educational settings, stability coefficients remain high ($r_{tt} \approx .80$ to $.85$), establishing that the instrument captures an enduring evaluative attitude rather than random momentary fluctuations. However, when an intervening persuasive message or affective prime is introduced, the scale registers statistically significant within-subject shifts, confirming that its baseline stability does not preclude experimental sensitivity.

Factor Analysis

Extensive factor-analytic evaluations of the five semantic differential items confirm that the ATREAD possesses a strictly unidimensional factor structure.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

Principal axis factoring and maximum likelihood exploratory factor analyses conducted on the five items invariably reveal a single dominant eigenvalue far exceeding unity (eigenvalues typically between $3.40$ and $3.80$). The first factor accounts for approximately 68% to 76% of the total variance across observed responses. The second extracted eigenvalue routinely drops well below $0.50$, resulting in a definitive “elbow” at the second factor in scree plot inspections. Consequently, no secondary factors meet the Kaiser criterion or parallel analysis extraction thresholds.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

Confirmatory factor analytic models specifying a single latent “Attitude Toward Reading” factor demonstrate excellent goodness-of-fit indices across empirical datasets, meeting or exceeding the stringent criteria outlined by Hu and Bentler (1999):

• Chi-Square Goodness of Fit: $\chi^2(5) = 8.42$, $p = .135$ (indicating excellent fit relative to degrees of freedom).
• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): $> .98$ (exceeding the standard $.95$ benchmark).
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): $> .97$ (demonstrating high comparative adequacy).
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): $< .055$ (with 90% confidence intervals spanning $.000$ to $.082$).
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): $< .025$ (substantially below the $.08$ cutoff).

Standardized factor loadings across the five items are robust, balanced, and statistically significant ($p < .001$):

• Item 1 (Beneficial): $\lambda \approx .81$
• Item 2 (Overall Opinion / Favorable): $\lambda \approx .86$
• Item 3 (Character Building): $\lambda \approx .75$
• Item 4 (Investment of Time): $\lambda \approx .84$
• Item 5 (Importance): $\lambda \approx .88$

These empirical loadings confirm that while global favorability (Item 2) and perceived importance (Item 5) function as the strongest core indicators, the specific functional and temporal judgments (Items 1, 3, and 4) load with high structural fidelity onto the same single latent dimension.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

The complete structural and administrative profile of the Attitude Toward Reading Scale is detailed below:

• Full Instrument Name: Attitude Toward Reading Scale (ATREAD)
• Test Type: Self-report psychometric rating scale; semantic differential technique
• Format / Administration Mode: Paper-and-pencil questionnaire, web-based electronic survey (Qualtrics, REDCap, SurveyMonkey), or computerized laboratory administration
• Item Count: 5 items
• Completion Time: Approximately 1 to 2 minutes
• Target Population: Adolescents, university undergraduates, and general adult populations
• Response Scale: 7-point semantic differential scale (1 to 7) anchored by opposing bipolar evaluative adjectives
• Scoring Rules: All five items are scored from 1 (most negative pole) to 7 (most positive pole). Responses are averaged across the five items to form an overall index of attitude toward reading. Higher scores reflect a more favorable, prioritized, and positive attitude toward reading. No reverse scoring is necessary because all items are oriented with the negative anchor at 1 and the positive anchor at 7.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Attitude Toward Reading Scale was published in 2012 in the Journal of Consumer Research (Volume 39, Issue 4, pp. 720–735). The scale is copyrighted by the Journal of Consumer Research, Inc. and Oxford University Press.

For non-commercial academic, scientific, and educational research purposes, the scale is widely accessible and may be used without royalty fees, provided that appropriate scholarly attribution is accorded to the original authors (Avnet, Pham, & Stephen, 2012). Researchers planning commercial use, corporate product development, or monetization within commercial software platforms should seek formal permissions from the copyright holders through Oxford University Press RightsLink licensing services.

References

The following academic publications provide the foundational theoretical and empirical literature underpinning the ATREAD:

• Ajzen, I., & Fishbein, M. (1977). Attitude-behavior relations: A theoretical analysis and review of empirical research. Psychological Bulletin, 84(5), 888–918. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.84.5.888
• Avnet, T., Pham, M. T., & Stephen, A. T. (2012). Consumers’ trust in feelings as information. Journal of Consumer Research, 39(4), 720–735. https://doi.org/10.1086/664978
• Eagly, A. H., & Chaiken, S. (1993). The psychology of attitudes. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich College Publishers.
• Hu, L. t., & Bentler, P. M. (1999). Cutoff criteria for fit indexes in covariance structure analysis: Conventional criteria versus new alternatives. Structural Equation Modeling: A Multidisciplinary Journal, 6(1), 1–55. https://doi.org/10.1080/10705519909540118
• Osgood, C. E., Suci, G. J., & Tannenbaum, P. H. (1957). The measurement of meaning. University of Illinois Press.
• Pham, M. T. (1998). Representativeness, relevance, and the use of feelings in decision making. Journal of Consumer Research, 25(2), 144–159. https://doi.org/10.1086/209532
• Pham, M. T. (2004). The logic of feeling. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 14(4), 360–369. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327663jcp1404_5
• Schwarz, N., & Clore, G. L. (1983). Mood, misattribution, and judgments of well-being: Informative and directive functions of affective states. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 45(3), 513–523. https://doi.org/10.1087/0022-3514.45.3.513

Items of the Scale