These scales always ask people to indicate how much they agree or disagree, approve or disapprove, believe to be true or false. It's best to use as wide a scale as possible since you can always collapse the responses into condensed categories later on for analysis purposes. Guttman scaling was developed in the 1940s and is a technique of mixing questions up in the sequence they are asked so that respondents don't see that several questions are related. A lot of irrelevant questions surround the important questions. The scoring system is based on how closely they follow a pattern of ever-increasing hardened attitude toward some topic in the important questions.
Crime is a serious problem in the United States.
Police should be given more powers. More criminals should be given the death penalty. The U.S. ought to do something about drug exporting countries. The military ought to be used to patrol our streets. Inmates on death row ought to be executed quickly.