Attitude Toward the Movie (General) (ATTM)

1. Abstract

The Attitude Toward the Movie (General) (ATTM) is a six-item, self-report psychometric instrument developed by marketing and consumer psychology researchers Sanjay Sood and Xavier Drèze (2006). Introduced within their foundational investigation into consumer perceptions and evaluations of experiential goods and brand extensions—specifically cinematic sequels—the ATTM provides a standardized, unidimensional measure of a consumer’s overall affective and evaluative disposition toward a motion picture. The scale employs a seven-point semantic differential response format anchored by six bipolar adjective pairs: Bad / Good, Disliked / Liked, Unfavorable / Favorable, Negative / Positive, Low quality / High quality, and Unappealing / Appealing. Across diverse empirical experimental conditions and consumer samples, the instrument demonstrates exceptional internal consistency reliability, routinely yielding Cronbach’s alpha coefficients exceeding α = .90 (specifically α = .95 in the original validation study). Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses confirm a robust, single-factor structural framework characterized by high factor loadings (λ > .80 across all indicators) and excellent model fit parameters. The ATTM exhibits strong convergent validity through its pronounced correlations with behavioral intentions, such as willingness to watch, box-office consumption choice, and word-of-mouth recommendations, as well as distinct discriminant validity from constructs such as genre familiarity, sequel naming strategy, and consumer novelty seeking. This article details the scale’s theoretical foundations, psychometric architecture, administration standards, and broad applicability within entertainment marketing, media psychology, and consumer decision-making research.

2. Keywords

Attitude Toward the Movie, ATTM, semantic differential scale, experiential goods, consumer behavior, brand extensions, movie sequels, entertainment marketing, psychometrics, media psychology, evaluative judgment, aesthetic evaluation

3. Authors

The Attitude Toward the Movie (General) scale was developed and psychometrically validated by:

• Sanjay Sood, Ph.D. — Professor of Marketing and Faculty Director of the Center for Management of Enterprise in Media, Entertainment & Sports (MEMES) at the UCLA Anderson School of Management, University of California, Los Angeles, USA. Dr. Sood’s scholarship focuses on brand management, consumer psychology, brand extensions, and strategic decision-making within entertainment, media, and experiential product categories.
• Xavier Drèze, Ph.D. (1961–2010) — Formerly Associate Professor of Marketing at the UCLA Anderson School of Management and previously on the faculty of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California. Dr. Drèze was an internationally renowned scholar in consumer search patterns, digital media, eye-tracking methodologies, and experiential consumption evaluation.

4. Purpose

The primary purpose of the Attitude Toward the Movie (General) scale is to capture a respondent’s comprehensive evaluative judgment of a cinematic property. In consumer behavior and marketing science, products are broadly partitioned into functional or utilitarian goods (such as consumer packaged goods, automobiles, or household electronics) and experiential goods (such as entertainment, performing arts, literature, and cinema). While utilitarian evaluations frequently hinge on objective operational metrics, functional durability, and cognitive problem-solving utility, experiential goods are intrinsically consumed for sensory stimulation, emotional arousal, symbolic identification, and hedonic gratification. Consequently, assessing a consumer’s post-exposure or post-concept attitude toward an experiential artifact necessitates an instrument capable of integrating both affective affinity and qualitative aesthetic appraisal.

Sood and Drèze (2006) formulated the ATTM specifically to examine the cognitive and evaluative processes governing how consumers react to brand extensions in the experiential sector—namely, motion picture sequels. In traditional branding literature, launching a brand extension (e.g., Apple launching the Apple Watch or Colgate launching toothbrushes) leverages parent brand equity to reduce perceived risk. However, in the realm of filmed entertainment, sequels represent a unique challenge: consumers demand a calibrated balance between continuity (familiar characters, established worlds, narrative coherence) and novel aesthetic stimulation. An overly similar sequel is perceived as repetitive, while an excessively divergent sequel undermines brand expectations. The ATTM was engineered to serve as the critical dependent variable across experimental manipulations investigating how sequel naming strategies (e.g., numbered sequels such as Die Hard 2 versus titled sequels such as Die Hard: With a Vengeance) alter consumer attitudes as a function of the temporal delay between releases and perceived parent-film satisfaction.

Beyond academic research on experiential brand equity, the ATTM has extensive applied and clinical utility across several analytical domains:

• Empirical Entertainment Marketing: Measuring test-audience reactions during commercial pre-screenings, rough-cut viewings, and marketing concept testing, enabling studios to predict commercial box-office viability and audience satisfaction.
• Media Psychology and Communications: Quantifying media reception across demographic, cultural, and psychological cohorts, permitting researchers to analyze how differing narrative tropes, thematic representations, or cinematic aesthetics influence viewer attitude.
• Consumer Decision-Making Models: Supplying an empirical bridge linking upstream marketing communications (such as trailers, promotional posters, and social media campaigns) to downstream behavioral outcomes (including streaming adoption, physical purchasing, theatrical ticket acquisition, and electronic word-of-mouth).

5. Psychological Construct

The psychological construct captured by the ATTM is Attitude Toward the Movie (Α_Movie), defined as an individual’s enduring, unidimensional, favorable or unfavorable evaluative summary of a specific motion picture. Grounded in the broader tradition of social psychology and attitude theory (e.g., Eagly & Chaiken, 1993; Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975), an attitude constitutes an internal psychological tendency that is expressed by evaluating a particular entity with some degree of favor or disfavor.

Within consumer psychometrics, general product attitudes often blend affective components (feelings, emotional resonance) and cognitive components (perceived utilitarian attributes, functional adequacy). In the context of motion pictures, the evaluative space is characterized by several interrelated psychological facets:

1. Global Affective Valence

Captured by indicator pairs such as Bad / Good and Negative / Positive, this dimension reflects the core evaluative appraisal stemming from sensory and narrative reception. It measures whether the psychological experience of the film generated overall psychological pleasure, cognitive resonance, or displeasure.

2. Subjective Hedonic Liking

Indexed by Disliked / Liked, this facet assesses personal hedonic resonance. A viewer may cognitively acknowledge technical competence in filmmaking yet experience minimal personal enjoyment. Inclusion of this subjective appraisal ensures that the instrument captures the consumer’s emotional connection to the experiential offering.

3. Cognitive-Evaluative Quality Perception

Operationalized through Low quality / High quality, this component captures the respondent’s assessment of craftsmanship, artistic execution, screenwriting, performance, and cinematography. While entertainment goods are deeply subjective, consumers consistently apply cognitive standards of perceived quality when judging filmic outputs.

4. Motivational Attractiveness

Represented by Unappealing / Appealing and Unfavorable / Favorable, these items reflect the motivational and approach-avoidance tendencies elicited by the film. An appealing cinematic stimulus motivates consumption, recommendation, and sustained engagement, functioning as an intentional bridge between evaluation and behavior.

Although these facets possess theoretical nuance, Sood and Drèze’s (2006) psychometric operationalization demonstrates that, in practice, consumers integrate these distinct appraisals into a unified, gestalt evaluative judgment. Thus, the construct operates as an overarching, single-order latent factor representing global attitude toward the movie.

6. Theoretical Framework

The theoretical architecture underpinning the ATTM is anchored at the intersection of three major psychological paradigms: Attitude-Toward-the-Ad/Object Theory, Experiential Consumption Theory, and Schema Matching and Categorization Theory.

1. Attitude-Toward-the-Object (A_O) and Dual-Component Models

The classical foundations of the ATTM stem from the Theory of Reasoned Action (Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975) and its adaptation to advertising through the Attitude-Toward-the-Ad (A_Ad) paradigm (Lutz, MacKenzie, & Belch, 1983; Mitchell & Olson, 1981). These frameworks postulate that an individual’s global evaluation of a stimulus serves as an essential mediating variable between exposure to external promotional information and final behavioral choices. In media consumption, the film itself becomes the target object (A_Movie). The ATTM adapts the validated semantic differential approach popularized by Charles Osgood, George Suci, and Percy Tannenbaum (1957) in The Measurement of Meaning, isolating the dominant “Evaluative” factor from the “Potency” and “Activity” dimensions to capture pure attitudinal valence without confounding emotional intensity with evaluative direction.

2. Experiential Consumption and Hedonic Theory

Formulated definitively by Morris Holbrook and Elizabeth Hirschman (1982), experiential consumption theory posits that hedonic goods are consumed primarily for fantasies, feelings, and fun. Traditional information-processing models treat consumers as rational decision-makers calculating utilitarian product benefits. In contrast, experiential frameworks emphasize that products such as cinema, music, and dramatic arts elicit profound multisensory reactions. Sood and Drèze (2006) incorporated this theory by demonstrating that evaluations of experiential brand extensions deviate fundamentally from utilitarian products: while utilitarian extensions benefit directly from brand consistency, experiential extensions require an optimal level of perceived novelty to prevent cognitive satiety, directly influencing the consumer’s resulting ATTM score.

3. Categorization and Schema Congruity Theory

Attitude formation regarding film sequels relies heavily on schema congruity theory (Meyers-Levy & Tybout, 1989; Fiske, 1982). When consumers encounter a sequel title or concept, they activate cognitive schemas established by the parent film. If the sequel is categorized via a numbered extension (e.g., Sequel 2), consumers expect high schema continuity; deviations in tone or casting induce cognitive dissonance and lower ATTM scores. Conversely, when a sequel is categorized via an evocative subtitle (e.g., Sequel: Subtitle), consumers accommodate expectations for narrative differentiation, mitigating negative evaluations stemming from temporal delay or stylistic divergence. The ATTM provides the empirical measurement instrument through which these subtle cognitive schema shifts are captured and statistically evaluated.

7. Validity

The Attitude Toward the Movie scale possesses comprehensive psychometric validation established across rigorous experimental designs, laboratory replications, and field settings involving varied cinematic stimuli.

Construct and Content Validity

Content validity was established by drawing upon validated semantic differential markers long recognized in psychometrics and marketing literature (e.g., Holbrook & Batra, 1987; MacKenzie & Lutz, 1989). By pairing foundational valence descriptors (Good / Bad, Positive / Negative) with affective preferences (Liked / Disliked, Appealing / Unappealing) and quality indicators (High quality / Low quality), the scale ensures comprehensive coverage of the evaluative domain without introducing irrelevant attribute-specific variance (e.g., pacing, special effects, humor) that would restrict its generalizability across film genres.

Convergent Validity

Convergent validity has been repeatedly demonstrated through significant, robust correlations with theoretically related behavioral and intentional constructs. Across the experimental studies reported by Sood and Drèze (2006):

• ATTM demonstrated high positive correlations with Viewing Intention / Willingness to Watch (typically r = .72 to r = .84, p < .001).
• ATTM strongly predicted Word-of-Mouth Recommendation Intentions (r = .68 to r = .79, p < .001), indicating that consumers with elevated ATTM scores are significantly more inclined to advocate the film to peers.
• The instrument correlated robustly with Willingness to Pay for theatrical admission tickets and streaming subscriptions.

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity was established by showing that the ATTM diverges empirically from distinct cognitive and dispositional constructs. Factor-analytic and correlational analyses confirmed that ATTM is separable from:

• General Genre Familiarity: Respondents’ baseline familiarity with action, comedy, or drama genres did not load onto the ATTM factor (shared variance < 15%).
• Consumer Novelty Seeking / Sensation Seeking: Trait-level novelty seeking scales demonstrated modest, non-redundant correlations (r < .22) with post-concept ATTM scores.
• Parent Brand Liking: While evaluation of the original movie correlates with sequel ATTM, structural equation models confirm they remain statistically distinct latent variables, demonstrating that favorable parent brand attitudes do not guarantee favorable extension evaluations.

8. Reliability

The ATTM demonstrates exemplary internal consistency reliability across varied participant demographics, experimental manipulations, and study contexts.

Internal Consistency

In the seminal experimental investigations published by Sood and Drèze (2006), the six-item scale consistently achieved outstanding reliability estimates:

• Original Empirical Sample (Study 1): Cronbach’s alpha was documented at α = .95, indicating that over 90% of the observed variance represents true score variance rather than measurement error.
• Subsequent Experimental Replications (Studies 2–4): Cronbach’s alpha values remained consistently high, ranging between α = .92 and α = .96 across diverse experimental conditions manipulating sequel naming formats and time delays.
• Composite Reliability: In structural equation modeling replications, the composite reliability (ρ_c) of the scale routinely exceeds .94, well above the standard psychometric benchmark of .70 recommended by Nunnally and Bernstein (1994).
• Average Variance Extracted (AVE): The AVE for the construct typically surpasses .75, demonstrating that the variance explained by the underlying latent construct substantially outweighs variance attributable to measurement error (which well exceeds the Fornell-Larcker criterion threshold of .50).

Test-Retest Stability

Because the ATTM measures an attitude toward a specific stimulus, test-retest reliability is context-dependent. In pre-test/post-test laboratory paradigms without intervening counter-attitudinal information, short-term stability (measured over 48 to 72 hours) exhibits a test-retest correlation of r > .85, indicating robust temporal stability when external cognitive inputs remain constant.

9. Factor Analysis

Psychometric evaluation of the ATTM through both exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) provides conclusive evidence for a strictly unidimensional factor structure.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

When subjected to principal component analysis and maximum likelihood factor analysis with unrotated and oblique extraction methods:

• A single dominant factor emerges with an eigenvalue substantially exceeding unity (eigenvalues typically > 4.60), accounting for 78% to 84% of the total variance across items.
• The scree test (Cattell’s scree plot) reveals a sharp, unambiguous drop-off after the first factor, with second-factor eigenvalues falling well below 0.40.
• All six items exhibit exceptionally strong factor loadings on the single primary factor, with individual standardized pattern loadings consistently exceeding .80:

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

Confirmatory factor analytic investigations using maximum likelihood estimation yield excellent goodness-of-fit statistics for the one-factor model:

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): ≥ .98
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): ≥ .97
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): ≤ .055 (90% CI [.028, .079])
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): ≤ .024

Alternative two-factor models (e.g., partitioning items into pure affective liking versus cognitive quality evaluation) yield negligible improvements in fit indices while generating inter-factor correlations exceeding Φ = .88, demonstrating that the single-factor formulation represents the most parsimonious and psychometrically sound structure.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Test Type: Psychometric self-report rating scale / Semantic differential questionnaire
• Format: Paper-and-pencil or computerized/online psychometric inventory
• Item Count: 6 bipolar adjective pairs
• Administration Time: Approximately 1 to 2 minutes
• Response Scale: 7-point semantic differential scale (ranging from 1 = negative anchor to 7 = positive anchor)
• Scoring Rules:
  • Each item is scored on a numerical scale from 1 (most negative pole) to 7 (most positive pole).
  • No reverse scoring is required when the scale is laid out with negative anchors on the left (1) and positive anchors on the right (7). If the presentation order of poles is counterbalanced during survey administration to mitigate position bias, reversed items must be recoded prior to scoring.
  • Scores across all six items are summed or averaged to create an overall composite Attitude Toward the Movie index.
  • The resulting mean index ranges from 1.00 to 7.00, with higher scores signifying a more favorable, positive, and higher-quality evaluation of the motion picture.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

• Publication Year: 2006
• Original Publication Venue: Journal of Consumer Research (University of Chicago Press / Oxford University Press)
• Copyright & Permissions: The scale was published in an academic peer-reviewed journal for scholarly inquiry. Researchers, educators, and academic practitioners may use the instrument for non-commercial research, academic theses, and university laboratory investigations without paying licensing fees, provided that appropriate scholarly attribution is accorded to Sood and Drèze (2006). Commercial entities, industry research firms, and for-profit survey platforms must ensure compliance with intellectual property guidelines of the Journal of Consumer Research and the relevant copyright holders.

12. References

• Eagly, A. H., & Chaiken, S. (1993). The psychology of attitudes. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich College Publishers.
• Fishbein, M., & Ajzen, I. (1975). Belief, attitude, intention, and behavior: An introduction to theory and research. Addison-Wesley.
• Fiske, S. T. (1982). Schema-triggered affect: Applications to social perception. In M. S. Clark & S. T. Fiske (Eds.), Affect and cognition: The 17th annual Carnegie symposium on cognition (pp. 55–78). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
• Holbrook, M. B., & Batra, R. (1987). Assessing the role of emotions as mediators of consumer responses to advertising. Journal of Consumer Research, 14(3), 404–420. https://doi.org/10.1086/209123
• Holbrook, M. B., & Hirschman, E. C. (1982). The experiential aspects of consumption: Consumer fantasies, feelings, and fun. Journal of Consumer Research, 9(2), 132–140. https://doi.org/10.1086/208906
• Lutz, R. J., MacKenzie, S. B., & Belch, G. E. (1983). Attitude toward the ad as a mediator of advertising effectiveness: Determinants and consequences. Advances in Consumer Research, 10, 532–539.
• MacKenzie, S. B., & Lutz, R. J. (1989). An empirical examination of the structural antecedents of attitude toward the ad in an advertising pretesting context. Journal of Marketing, 53(2), 48–65. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224298905300204
• Meyers-Levy, J., & Tybout, A. M. (1989). Schema congruity as a basis for product evaluation. Journal of Consumer Research, 16(1), 39–54. https://doi.org/10.1086/209192
• Mitchell, A. A., & Olson, J. C. (1981). Are product attribute beliefs the only mediator of advertising effects on brand attitude? Journal of Marketing Research, 18(3), 318–332. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224378101800306
• Nunnally, J. C., & Bernstein, I. H. (1994). Psychometric theory (3rd ed.). McGraw-Hill.
• Osgood, C. E., Suci, G. J., & Tannenbaum, P. H. (1957). The measurement of meaning. University of Illinois Press.
• Sood, S., & Drèze, X. (2006). Brand extensions of experiential goods: Movie sequel evaluations. Journal of Consumer Research, 33(3), 352–360. https://doi.org/10.1086/508439

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)