Construction and validation of an Animal-Human Continuity Scale

A 12-item Animal-Human Continuity Scale with a Likert-type 7-option format was constructed to measure the extent to which the respondent views humans and animals in a dichotomous fashion vs. on a continuum. After the generation of items on a rational basis, item selection was based on ratings of content validity followed by item-total score correlation based on a sample of 88 graduate students, faculty and university staff participants. The scale contained such items as “Humans can think but animals cannot”, “People evolved from lower animals”, and “People have a spiritual nature but animals do not”. A Cronbach’s alpha of .69 was obtained. The scale yielded three factors – “rational capacity”, “superiority vs. equality”, and “evolutionary continuum”. More traditionally religious participants tended to respond in the dichotomous direction. In another validation project a significant difference in the expected direction was found for participants from a Unitarian Universalist church (in the continuous direction) and a conservative Methodist church (dichotomous direction). Implications for the use of this instrument in the measurement of individual differences are discussed.