Similarities and differences in social attitudes in four Western countries1

A referents scale (single words and short phrases) constructed to measure social attitudes and values was administered to 500 graduate students of education in the United States, 427 mature evening students in Spain, 130 German students, 270 Dutch students, and 685 Dutch adults, a random sample of the Netherlands. The attitudes of the samples were compared by analysis of the means of clusters of referents associated with the factors common to all samples. The means of selected individual referents of social significance were similarly compared across samples. In general, the U.S. student sample and the Netherlands random sample were more conservative than the Spanish, Dutch, and German student samples. On the other hand, the Dutch, Spanish, and American students were more liberal than the Dutch random sample and the German students. The correlations between the profiles of means of referents common to pairs of samples were mostly substantial (average r 's of .75 for conservative referents and .62 for liberal referents), indicating considerable cross‐cultural agreement in the rank ordering of the referents within the conservative and within the liberal categories, and thus, presumably, common cores of reaction to the two kinds of referents. The use of attitude‐value referents, especially in cross‐cultural research, was judged valid and useful.