In Defense of Measuring Attitudes

Summary

To investigate the validity of personality measures, a 43-item liberalism-conservatism scale was administered to 86 college students and 40 noncollege adults. In both samples, scores were related to presidential preferences, fundamentalism, and church attendance; among the students, scores were also related to the wearing of jeans. It was not possible to determine why some items were better than others. It was argued that the data cannot be understood without a concept like “liberalism-conservatism,” and that the scale turned out to be valid because it sampled widely from the domain of the construct, and because respondents did not fear the consequences of their answers, either in terms of self-image or in terms of the possible subsequent actions of someone in power.