Primary Social Attitudes as Related to Social Class and Political Party

tN A previous paper [42, the striter has reported an attempt to study the | organization of attitudes in a middle-elass urban British sample. Age, Aedueation and sex vvere earefully controlled, and the sample vas selected in sueh a way that the three major politieal parties were equally represented. A forty-item attitude questionnaire was answered by 250 eonservatives, 250 lilerals and 250 soeialists, equated for a^,e, sex and edueation; these 40 items ssere intereorrelated for the total sample of 750, and the resulting matrix faetor-analysed. Two major faetors emerged eonfirming essentially a former study analysing responses of I,500 subjeets [3]. One of the faetors *^as easily identifiable in terms of the radieal-eonservative diehotomy. Proof of the eorreet identifieation of this faetor was supplied in terms of an early applieation of the writer's teehnique of eriterion analysis [5], by eorrelating the eolumn of faetor saturations with a Criterion Column whieh was eonstrueted by tal;ing, for eaeh item, the differenee in endorsement of that item between the eonsenrative and soeialist groups. This eorrelation was highly signifieant (r 0 98), thus supporting the tentative identifieation of this faetor. The seeond faetor was less elearly identifiable with any existing soeiologieal or psrehologieal eoneept, and provisionally the terms tender-mindedness and tough-mindedness were adopted from W. James's xvritings to eharaeterize the extremes of this bi-polar faetor. Relatively high values for the index of reliability were shown to eharaeterize two fourteen-item seales derived from the original set of items to measure the two faetors R and T respeetively; these values show that both seales are measuring with a eertain amount of eonsisteney some hypothetieal underlying variables in terms of szrhieh the obsersFed intereorrelations ean be interpreted [2, 4]. The faet that the eorrelation bet^reen R and T is effeetisFely equal to zero (r _-*I2) iS further proof of the independenee of these two faetors. The three politieal parties studied sere shown to be differentiated very signifieantly with respeet to the