Psychology and the Social Pattern by Julian Blackburn

Author:Julian Blackburn [Blackburn, Julian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781136276781
Google: KkFdAgAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 17394120
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-06-03T00:00:00+00:00

Thurstone17 has devised an elaborate technique for measuring a person’s attitudes on about forty different topics, and he claims it gives a more exact indication of the person’s attitudes than most other methods. First of all a large number of heterogeneous opinions about, say, the movies are collected from a wide variety of sources. These are then sorted by scores of judges into a number of piles which represent degrees of favourableness or unfavourableness of the attitude expressed by each statement, and from these it is possible to calculate the score (representing the degree of favourableness or unfavourableness) which should be attached to each statement, and to eliminate those which are unreliable. In the case of the attitude towards the movies the score ranged from 5 (the most favourable) to o (the most unfavourable). Favourable and unfavourable opinions balanced each other fairly evenly so that the middle score was about 2.5.

(4.7) The movies are the most powerful influence for good in American life.

(0.0) It is a sin to go to the movies.

(2.4) Sometimes I feel that the movies are desirable and sometimes I doubt it.

The figures in brackets represent the degree of favourableness or unfavourableness of the statements. The respondent, without knowing the scores, marks the statements with which he is in agreement, thus indicating his average attitude and also the range of opinions with which he is willing to ally himself.

FACTOR ANALYSIS 18

In the factorial technique a number of people (the larger the better) is given a battery of tests, and a table of correlation coefficients, representing the degree of agreement between the scores on the different tests is worked out. From this it may emerge that the scores on some of the tests are more highly correlated than those of others, and it may be possible to account for those showing the highest correlation by a general factor. Then, when the effect of this general factor on the correlation coefficients is removed, the remaining correlation coefficients are examined to discover whether a second factor can be extracted, and so on.

A number of factors are claimed to have been isolated by this technique, e.g. “v” a verbal factor, “c+” or “surgency”, which Cattell19 believes to be very similar to extraversion, “c – “or “desurgency”, which is similar to introversion, “p” or “perseveration”, and so on. Clearly it would be a great advantage if, instead of giving more or less adequate descriptions of a large number of different attitudes and functions and sentiments of human beings, we were able to discover a few fundamental and basic elements, which, perhaps, might even turn out on further investigation to be intimately related to an individual’s genetic constitution. It would open the possibility of exciting experiments on the Mendelian inheritance of these factors.20

Unfortunately the statistical techniques which are employed to discover the existence of factors sometimes have the disadvantage of producing a factor which is such a conglomeration of heterogeneous aspects of traits that it has little or no meaning in behavioural terms.

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