Adjective Checklist

The Adjective Checklist (ACL) is a measure of children's attitudes that utilizes a checklist format first employed by Harrison Gough. The ACL has been employed in more than 30 studies to assess children's attitudes toward persons from potentially stigmatized groups, with a focus on peers with mental retardation. Other studies have examined attitudes toward children with visual impairments, autism, obesity, cancer, and physical disabilities, as well as toward tobacco users.

The ACL was developed to assess the cognitive component of children's attitudes (opinions and beliefs about a person), one of three components that make up attitudes (together with the affective component, i.e., emotions and feelings about a person, and the behavioral [Page 13]intentions component, i.e., intentions to interact with a person). It uses an open-ended format that allows children to select from a provided list as many positive and negative adjectives as they wish to select to describe a specific person (known as a target). The open-ended approach of the ACL does not restrict children to making judgments that they may not ordinarily make, the way a forced choice format might. That is, the ACL mirrors the behavior of children in classroom settings where children express their opinions or beliefs about a peer by using common descriptors such as “smart,” “mean,” “friendly,” and so on.

The ACL was developed by asking large samples of children in Grades 1 through 6 to identify terms they would use to describe a person they liked and a person they did not like. Those terms that were mentioned most often were compiled into a list, and new samples of children were asked to judge each term as a “good” thing or a “bad” thing to say about someone. As a result, 34 adjectives were identified that describe a person's affective feelings, physical appearance, academic behavior, and social behavior. Within these broad categories, the ACL includes equal numbers of positive and negative descriptors. Factor analysis of ACL responses from more than 2,000 elementary school children revealed three distinct factors: positive (P factor, e.g., “proud,” “happy”), negative (N factor, e.g., “careless,” “ugly”), and negative affect (NA factor, e.g., “lonely,” “ashamed”).

The ACL can be administered to children individually or in groups by asking the children to use the checklist to describe a particular target. The target may be either a hypothetical student depicted in a videotaped vignette, a photograph, a verbal description, or a real individual. In each instance, the target is presented, and then the children are asked to describe the target using as few or as many words from the list as they would like. There are two methods for scoring the ACL. The first method involves summing up a child's selection of adjectives on each of the three factors noted above. The second method results in a composite score in which the number of negative adjectives chosen by a child is subtracted from the number of positive adjectives chosen, and a constant of 20 is added. In this method, the negative adjectives would include all adjectives in the N factor and the NA factor (i.e, Total Score = P − N − NA + 20). A resulting score below 20 represents a negative attitude toward the target, and a score above 20 represents a positive attitude.

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