Attitudinal Variables in Civil Engineering Design

Civil Engineering planning and design has long been a bastion for objective analysis, usually, at the exclusion of important subjective variables. Only recently has a segment of civil engineering (transportation engineering) made significant attempts to incorporate attitudes and values of the user as quantitative variables integral to planning and design. The purpose of this paper is to examine the formulation of attitudinal variables, their quantification, and their application to civil engineering design studies. An overview of various experimental procedures for collection of data necessary for determining quantitative measures for attitudinal variables is presented together with basic theoretical components of psychometric scaling. Possible applications of these techniques to the various fields within civil engineering are examined. The results give evidence of a new approach toward the development of design criteria.