- Published: September 25, 2022
- Updated: September 25, 2022
- Level: College Admission
- Language: English
- Downloads: 30
Social Effects of War in Iraq War is the given to an official fight between two groups with conflicting interests. Since not only these two groups live in the world, it is obvious that other innocent people usually get caught up in the current and suffer way more than either side actually fighting. The effects of war are deep routed and last for decades and even centuries in the case of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Some very apparent problems are political, economical and psychological. But at the core of these problems erupting because of war are societal problems.
The worst struck by wars are people directly involved in the war – soldiers, their families and Iraqi civilians. These individuals critically create a society. Attitude formation of Iraqi civilians towards the Americans will expectedly be very unforgiving. They will be desperate to seek revenge from them for tearing apart their homes and killing their children for no apparent reason. Even though no American was personally involved in this except for the US government and the forces, the Iraqi civilians will develop a deep hatred for all Americans as it will remind them of their perfect lives that they ruined. (Farris, 2002)
Attitude measurement is a quantitative technique used to measure the change in attitude towards a certain object (Bohner & Wnke, 2002). In this particular case the attitude measurement will be to see which factors have influenced change in the minds of the Iraqi civilians about Americans on the whole and especially George Bush. As said before, it comes as no surprise that individuals directly involved in the war will develop an extremely negative impression of the Americans. But those individuals, who were not directly involved, like the American civilians, have developed a sympathetic attitude towards the Iraqi people. This is because Americans are highly aware and they are much more civilized than Iraqi people. They value life more. At seeing the injustice being done to the Iraqis they took a sympathetic stand. (Garca, 2004) (Farris, 2002)
These negative attitudes of the Iraqis need to be changed because where they might be correct, they are wrong about the fact that they should hate all Americans. The possible solution for Americans is to empathize with the Iraqis and lend a helping hand to them. Americans should help rebuild Iraq and give monetary help to those whose bread winners have been killed in the war. In time maybe, their attitude may change. It will take time because they have gone through a lot of psychological trauma and no one can blame them for acting in the way they are acting now. (Garca, 2004)
One way in which attitude change of Iraqis can be measured is Louis Thurstone’s successive intervals theory, in which you statistically place items of relevance on a continuum. The advantage of this is that you don’t have to rely on subjective answer of every subject and that a rank order is developed which is easier to read and draw conclusions from. Another better approach is use Guttman’s uni-dimensionality theory. It is pretty much the same as Thurstone’s but differs in that he stressed on uni-dimensionality of the situation. He says that if a person agrees to an all encompassing statement, he should also agree to its parts for example ” Wars are bad” and ” wars over oil are bad” should carry equal weight in his head. This makes studying attitude change very simple and uncomplicated. But on the other hand, it reduces precision of the research. (Bohner & Wnke, 2002)
Works Cited
1. Gerd Bohner and Michaela Wnke (2002). Attitudes and Attitude Change. Psychology Press
2. Kasey Farris (2002). Attitude Change. Retrieved March 24, 2008, from web site: http://www. ciadvertising. org/SA/fall_02/adv382j/kfarri1/attitude_measurement2. html
3. Manuel Garca, Jr. (2004). Effects Of Iraq War On American Citizens. Retrieved March 24, 2008, from web site: http://www. swans. com/library/art10/mgarci08. html