Development and validation of the commitment to social activism scale using the Thurstone scaling procedure

This paper centers on social activism, a distinctive form of behavior characterized by escalating actions that vary in degrees of difficulty and commitment. Rather than adopting a Likert scaling approach, we embrace a Thurstone technique to construct a commitment to social activism scale (CSAS). We incorporate focus groups, online survey data, and tests of validity in a multistage approach. The validity of CSAS was examined using convergent (activist identity and activist intention) and discriminant (trait anger and dogmatism) scales. Moving forward, the Thurstone scaling procedure used can be mirrored to improve theoretical work studying escalating behaviors across communication topics.