Attitudes toward terrorism: an explorative analysis on a Northern-Italy sample

The aim of the research was to explore the attitudes towards terrorism of people who hear of it and know about its seriousness only through the mass media. Via structured and semi-structured interviews (carried out with 29 people, 15 male and 14 female, of different ages) a 120-item questionnaire was devised that assesses attitudes to and opinions on three different areas: terrorism and terrorists; Islam; terrorist organizations and actions (ETA; IRA; the Palestinians; September 11; March 11). Besides asking socio-demographic questions, two instruments were also used: the Subtle and Blatant Prejudice Scale (Pettigrew & Meertens, 1995) and the Religious Orientation Scale-Revised (Gorsuch & McPherson, 1989). The instruments were administered to a sample of 249 people residing in Northern Italy, selected according to gender and specific age groups. The exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis conducted on the items yielded 12 factors. The two most important factors are about two different kinds of perceived causality (individual and contextual) and resemble the distinction that can be found in the literature between psychological and sociological theories on the explanation of terrorist behaviour. Other important factors are Islam stereotype, Dislike of the US, and Idealism of terrorist organizations. However, few participants had opinions other than neutrality towards the IRA and ETA. Further analyses (cluster analysis and partial correlations analysis on factor scores) showed a link between political trend and factor scores for some factors and the importance of the two main factors (individual causality and contextual causality) in relation to other factors studied in the analyses.