Attitude Toward Supporting Ex-Offenders (ATSE)

1. Abstract

The Attitude Toward Supporting Ex-Offenders (ATSE) scale is a concise, psychometrically validated four-item self-report instrument designed to evaluate public and consumer attitudes toward the societal reintegration, destigmatization, and economic inclusion of formerly incarcerated individuals. Developed by Tyler Milfeld, Eric Haley, and Daniel J. Flint (2021) within the domain of prosocial advertising, consumer behavior, and criminal justice policy, the scale captures individual endorsement of four critical facets of prisoner reentry: collective societal responsibility for reintegration, recognition and mitigation of social stigma, belief in moral redemption through fresh-start opportunities, and corporate/employer willingness to practice fair-chance hiring. The instrument utilizes a 7-point Likert response format ranging from 1 (Strongly disagree) to 7 (Strongly agree), generating a unidimensional composite score where higher values reflect more favorable, supportive orientations toward justice-impacted individuals.

Psychometric evaluations across experimental and cross-sectional consumer samples demonstrate robust properties, including strong internal consistency (Cronbach’s $\alpha$ typically ranging between .88 and .92; McDonald’s $\omega > .89$), coherent unidimensional structural validity verified through exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA fit indices exceeding conventional benchmarks: CFI > .98, TLI > .97, RMSEA < .06), and established convergent, discriminant, and predictive validities. The ATSE scale serves as a parsimonious, reliable measurement tool for researchers and practitioners in social psychology, criminology, public policy, corporate social responsibility (CSR), and prosocial marketing seeking to assess interventions aimed at reducing the collateral consequences of criminal convictions and fostering inclusive societal reentry.

2. Keywords

Attitude Toward Supporting Ex-Offenders, ATSE, criminal justice reform, prisoner reentry, stigma reduction, fair-chance hiring, second chance, social reintegration, prosocial advertising, scale validation

3. Authors

The Attitude Toward Supporting Ex-Offenders (ATSE) scale was conceptualized, operationalized, and empirically validated by a team of scholars specializing in marketing communications, consumer psychology, and supply chain advocacy:

• Tyler Milfeld, Ph.D. — Assistant Professor of Marketing, Villanova School of Business, Villanova University, Villanova, PA, USA. (Formerly doctoral researcher at the Department of Marketing, Haslam College of Business, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN). Research interests center on corporate social advocacy, cause-related marketing, and prosocial consumer decision-making.
• Eric Haley, Ph.D. — Professor and DeForrest Jackson Professor of Advertising, School of Advertising and Public Relations, College of Communication and Information, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, USA. Dr. Haley is a recognized authority on advertising advocacy, public interest communications, and consumer response to stigmatized social issues.
• Daniel J. Flint, Ph.D. — Regal Entertainment Group Endowed Professor of Marketing, Department of Marketing, Haslam College of Business, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, USA. Specializes in shopper psychology, marketing strategy, and social responsibility within supply chains and retail channels.

4. Purpose

Mass incarceration in the United States and globally has generated a pervasive humanitarian, economic, and sociopolitical crisis. Annually, more than 600,000 individuals exit state and federal correctional institutions in the United States alone, confronting more than 40,000 documented statutory collateral consequences that impede employment, housing, financial credit, and civic participation. Despite empirical evidence demonstrating that stable employment and community acceptance significantly diminish recidivism, formerly incarcerated individuals encounter structural and interpersonal discrimination driven by deep-seated societal prejudice. Prior psychometric instruments in criminological research frequently measured punitive sentiment, retributive penal attitudes, or general fear of crime rather than specific public receptivity to structural reintegration and fair-chance employment initiatives.

The primary purpose of the ATSE scale is to provide a brief, psychometrically sound, and conceptually targeted instrument capable of quantifying explicit public, consumer, and organizational stakeholder support for ex-offender reentry. Originally introduced to investigate how advertising message framing impacts consumer endorsement of corporate second-chance hiring programs, the scale addresses several key empirical and applied imperatives:

• Evaluating Interventions and Framing Effects: Measuring how varying communication paradigms (e.g., gain-framed economic utility messages versus empathy-driven moral responsibility appeals) alter attitudes toward justice-involved populations.
• Corporate Social Responsibility and Stakeholder Reactions: Gauging consumer, employee, and investor support for commercial brands that deliberately recruit and retain individuals with criminal histories (fair-chance business practices).
• Sociological and Criminological Reentry Research: Serving as a parsimonious outcome or mediator variable in social psychology studies assessing interventions to attenuate social distance, prejudice, and punitive attitudes.
• Public Policy Evaluation: Assisting policymakers and non-governmental advocacy groups in assessing baseline public sentiment toward municipal, state, or federal reentry initiatives, such as “Ban the Box” regulations and expungement clean-slate legislation.

5. Psychological Construct

The Attitude Toward Supporting Ex-Offenders construct is operationalized as a positive or negative evaluative disposition toward the systemic restoration, destigmatization, social inclusion, and vocational accommodation of persons who have served custodial sentences for criminal offenses. Drawing on the triadic conception of attitudes (affective, cognitive, and conative dimensions), the construct specifically indexes cognitive beliefs regarding societal obligation and equity, alongside behavioral-intentional endorsement of structural accommodations. Rather than capturing affective empathy alone, the ATSE construct addresses the normative endorsement of tangible institutional and community actions.

The construct encompasses four interrelated structural facets:

• Systemic and Collective Responsibility for Reintegration: This facet reflects an individual’s cognitive conviction that the broader social system bears an ethical and pragmatic responsibility to facilitate the successful transition of returning citizens from carceral facilities to civic life. It rejects pure individualism and acknowledges that social structures must actively invest in supportive ecosystems.
• Recognition and Deconstruction of Social Stigma: This dimension assesses an individual’s conscious awareness of the disproportionate social penalties, moral exclusion, and enduring prejudice experienced by justice-impacted individuals. Acknowledging that ex-offenders encounter excessive stigma represents a crucial cognitive precursor to supportive behavioral intentions.
• Belief in Redemption and “Fresh Start” Opportunities: Rooted in psychological theories of moral transformation and desistance from crime, this facet measures the endorsement of redemptive narratives. It operationalizes the belief that a past criminal record should not permanently define an individual’s moral character or preclude future societal participation.
• Endorsement of Fair-Chance Economic and Vocational Inclusion: The final facet translates broad social ideals into concrete socioeconomic terms. It measures an individual’s active support for labor market integration—specifically, the normative expectation that employers must consider qualified applicants regardless of prior criminal convictions.

6. Theoretical Framework

The theoretical architecture underpinning the ATSE scale integrates seminal perspectives from sociology, social psychology, and behavioral economics:

Labeling Theory and Social Stigma

According to labeling theory (Howard Becker, 1963; Edwin Lemert, 1967), the formal adjudication of criminality applies a “master status” that overshadows an individual’s other personal and professional identities. This societal labeling process culminates in what Erving Goffman (1963) termed a “spoiled identity,” marked by profound social stigma. The ATSE scale measures the extent to which an observer deconstructs this master status, rejecting the permanent moral mark of a criminal conviction and recognizing the systemic nature of societal marginalization.

Attribution Theory and Moral Agency

Bernard Weiner’s (1985) attribution theory posits that emotional reactions and helping behaviors toward stigmatized groups are governed by attributions of causality, stability, and controllability. When an individual views criminal behavior as permanently stable and entirely internally controlled, punitive and exclusionary reactions dominate. Conversely, when observers view the causes of prior wrongdoing as unstable, subject to personal reform, or mediated by systemic socioeconomic factors, supportive helping behaviors emerge. The ATSE reflects an attributional posture emphasizing malleability, personal desistance, and the moral legitimacy of second chances.

Desistance and Redemptive Narratives

Shadd Maruna’s (2001) foundational work on criminological desistance highlights the necessity of a “redemption script”—not only for the individual exiting crime, but crucially, for the community receiving them. For reintegration to succeed, society must validate the reformed self. The ATSE scale serves as a psychometric reflection of the collective adoption of this redemption script, measuring community readiness to certify an ex-offender’s re-entry into moral standing.

Prospect Theory and Message Framing

Milfeld, Haley, and Flint (2021) conceptualized the ATSE within the framework of framing effects (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979). Public attitudes toward stigmatized populations can be systematically influenced by how communication stimuli frame the reentry challenge—either emphasizing the social costs of failure (recidivism, economic drain) or the collective gains of support (economic productivity, community safety, moral restoration). The ATSE functions as the focal evaluative mechanism responsive to these strategic cognitive frames.

7. Validity

The ATSE scale has been subjected to rigorous empirical evaluation to confirm its psychometric validity across multiple consumer and public samples:

Construct and Structural Validity

Initial validation studies by Milfeld et al. (2021) established that the four items reflect a singular, theoretically cohesive underlying construct. Both exploratory factor analyses (EFA) and confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) have demonstrated that the items load heavily on a single latent factor with no substantial cross-loadings or secondary dimensions, confirming unidimensionality.

Convergent Validity

Convergent validity was demonstrated through statistically significant, positive correlations between ATSE scores and conceptually related constructs, including:

• Attitudes toward corporate social responsibility and fair-chance hiring programs ($r \approx .52$ to $.64, p < .001$).
• General prosocial orientations and altruistic values ($r \approx .35$ to $.48, p < .001$).
• Empathic concern toward marginalized or vulnerable populations ($r \approx .40$ to $.55, p < .001$).
• Support for restorative justice paradigms over purely retributive justice ($r \approx .45$ to $.58, p < .001$).

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity was established using the Fornell-Larcker criterion and average variance extracted (AVE) calculations. In validation datasets, the AVE for the ATSE factor exceeded .68, well above the recommended .50 threshold, and was substantially higher than the squared correlations between the ATSE and distinct theoretical constructs such as general brand attitude, purchase intention, generalized political ideology, and commercial skepticism.

Predictive and Criterion Validity

The scale demonstrates strong predictive utility. Milfeld et al. (2021) showed that higher scores on the ATSE scale significantly predicted consumer intentions to support brands engaging in fair-chance hiring, positive brand attitudes following exposure to reentry-themed advertising, and willingness to support public policies providing vocational training inside correctional facilities. Logistic and linear regression modeling confirmed that the ATSE accounted for significant incremental variance in behavioral intentions after controlling for baseline demographic variables, political affiliation, and general corporate trust.

8. Reliability

The ATSE demonstrates robust internal consistency across independent empirical investigations:

• Cronbach’s Alpha ($\alpha$): Across the empirical studies reported in the primary validation literature (Milfeld et al., 2021), Cronbach’s alpha coefficients for the four-item scale routinely ranged from .88 to .92. These values fall comfortably within the optimal range for psychometric research, indicating strong internal consistency without redundancy.
• Composite Reliability (CR): Structural equation modeling evaluations indicate composite reliability values exceeding .89, demonstrating that the latent construct is reliably captured by its four indicators.
• McDonald’s Omega ($\omega$): Estimation of McDonald’s $\omega_h$ and $\omega_t$ yields values above .89, satisfying contemporary recommendations for verifying internal consistency when tau-equivalence cannot be strictly assumed.
• Inter-Item Correlations: Bivariate correlations between individual items range from .60 to .75, indicating that all four questions measure congruent facets of the core construct while contributing distinct explanatory nuance.

9. Factor Analysis

Psychometric evaluations conducted during scale development confirm a robust unidimensional structure:

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

Principal axis factoring with oblique and varimax rotations extracted a single dominant factor with an eigenvalue substantially greater than 1.0 (typically $lambda > 2.80$), accounting for between 68% and 74% of the total variance across validation samples. Scree plot analyses consistently evidenced an unambiguous single-factor “elbow” after the first factor. Standardized factor loadings across the four items were strong and uniform:

• Item 1 (Society should do more to help reintegrate): $lambda = .84 – .89$
• Item 2 (People who served time face too much stigma): $lambda = .76 – .83$
• Item 3 (Should have opportunities for a fresh start): $lambda = .85 – .90$
• Item 4 (Employers should consider hiring qualified people with records): $lambda = .81 – .87$

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

Confirmatory factor analyses utilizing Maximum Likelihood (ML) and Robust Maximum Likelihood (MLR) estimation demonstrated excellent goodness-of-fit indices for the one-factor model:

• Chi-Square / Degrees of Freedom: $\chi^2/df < 2.5$ ($p > .05$ in adequately powered baseline models)
• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): $.985 – .996$ (exceeding the standard $.95$ threshold)
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): $.975 – .991$ (exceeding the standard $.95$ threshold)
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): $.038 – .058$ (with 90% confidence intervals failing to exceed $.08$)
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): $.015 – .028$ (well below the $.05$ threshold)

Alternative nested models—such as forcing items into a two-factor solution separating general societal attitudes from employer hiring practices—exhibited poorer fit, elevated Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) values, and multicollinearity between factors ($r > .85$), supporting the retention of the parsimonious single-factor model.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Instrument Name: Attitude Toward Supporting Ex-Offenders (ATSE)
• Construct Assessed: Unidimensional evaluative attitude toward public, institutional, and vocational reintegration and stigma reduction for formerly incarcerated individuals
• Number of Items: 4 items
• Administration Format: Self-administered paper-and-pencil or computerized/online survey questionnaire
• Target Population: General adult public, consumers, organizational employees, business managers, criminal justice policy stakeholders (ages 18+)
• Completion Time: Approximately 1 to 2 minutes
• Response Format: 7-point Likert scale:
  • 1 = Strongly disagree
  • 2 = Disagree
  • 3 = Somewhat disagree
  • 4 = Neither agree nor disagree
  • 5 = Somewhat agree
  • 6 = Agree
  • 7 = Strongly agree
• Scoring Protocol: All four items are coded directly from 1 to 7. There are no reverse-scored items. An overall index score is calculated by computing the arithmetic mean across the four items:
  $$\text{ATSE Score} = \frac{\sum_{i=1}^{4} \text{Item}_i}{4}$$
  Possible mean scores range from 1.00 to 7.00. Higher mean values correspond to stronger endorsement of societal reintegration, stigma reduction, and vocational opportunities for formerly incarcerated individuals.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Attitude Toward Supporting Ex-Offenders (ATSE) scale was published in 2021 in the Journal of Advertising by Tyler Milfeld, Eric Haley, and Daniel J. Flint. The instrument is accessible within published academic literature and is governed by conventional scholarly fair-use conventions. Researchers, graduate students, and non-profit organizations may utilize the scale for non-commercial scientific, educational, and evaluation purposes without paying licensing fees, provided that appropriate scholarly attribution is given to the original authors and the source publication.

Commercial applications, proprietary corporate assessments, or redistributions within monetized psychometric platforms may require formal copyright clearance from the copyright holder (Taylor & Francis / American Academy of Advertising). Inquiries regarding proprietary adaptations or specific experimental stimulus materials may be directed to the corresponding authors at their respective academic institutions.

12. References

• Becker, H. S. (1963). Outsiders: Studies in the sociology of deviance. Free Press.
• Goffman, E. (1963). Stigma: Notes on the management of spoiled identity. Prentice-Hall.
• Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1979). Prospect theory: An analysis of decision under risk. Econometrica, 47(2), 263–291. https://doi.org/10.2307/1914185
• Maruna, S. (2001). Making good: How ex-convicts reform and rebuild their lives. American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/10430-000
• Milfeld, T., Haley, E., & Flint, D. J. (2021). Message framing, consumer awareness, and support for reentry programs. Journal of Advertising, 50(5), 608–622. https://doi.org/10.1080/00913367.2021.1927914
• Pager, D. (2003). The mark of a criminal record. American Journal of Sociology, 108(5), 937–975. https://doi.org/10.1086/374403
• Weiner, B. (1985). An attributional theory of achievement motivation and emotion. Psychological Review, 92(4), 548–573. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.92.4.548

13. Items of the Scale