Consensual Attitudes and Attitude Structure

Analyses of attitude consistency have usually operationally defined consistency in terms of high statistical association between questionnaire items. For a variety of statistical reasons researchers have avoided subject areas where such consistency is likely or, if these areas are investigated, the results tend to be misleading. These problems are illustrated by an examination of attitude coherence on racial issues among blacks and whites in 1968. Robert Weissberg is Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. POQ 40 (1976) 349-359 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.191 on Tue, 11 Oct 2016 05:19:18 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 350 ROBERT WEISSBERG Second, some of the statistical aspects of the search for structure will be analyzed to show that what might appear to be "minor" statistical assumptions are of paramount importance in depicting coherence. Finally, we shall present illustrative data on various civil rights issues drawn from SRC surveys that show virtually no structure when in fact the degree of coherence is almost perfect. The Choice of Subject Matter While we cannot say exactly why some issue areas are more popular than others in the study of attitude structure, two general selection principles are clear. The most important criterion is that issues in some sense relate to a broad "ideological" theme such as civil liberties or economic liberalism. Some of these ideological themes have been criticized on the grounds that doctrines like economic liberalism-conservatism may be meaningless to most respondents, but this is a criticism of the a priori selection of structuring criteria, not the search for attitude structure per se. A second criterion is that the issue must be controversial. One would not, for example, ask questions about establishing a state religion since answers are generally known in advance and are unrelated to any immediate policy, choice, or debate. Both criteria of question selection lead the researcher away from highly consensual attitudes and toward issues over which people disagree. The very idea of an "ideological" theme entails political conflict, so questions on which disagreements are minor are consciously or unconsciously excluded. Moreover, opinions on uncontroversial topics are "uninteresting" to survey analysts (and probably to respondents, as well). These substantive selection criteria are strongly reinforced by several methodological requirements of "good" index or scale construction. ODne such requirement is that questions (or scales) must discriminate, that is, place significant numbers of people in different categories. Hence, if responses do not vary, the item is either dropped entirely or somehow subdivided to yield a range of responses. A second methodological reason for avoiding consensus is that without variance to explain, virtually all common statistical analyses of relationships are meaningless. Constants cannot explain or be explained, and if they were used, the results would either be zero or indeterminate. Finally, though the reliability of most survey questions is rarely examined, it is sometimes assumed that politically divisive items generate more thought and thus are more stable. These reasons for selecting nonconsensual attitude items are by no means wrong or irrelevant. We obviously cannot deny the value of research on conflicting questions using standard statistical procedures. Nevertheless, it is indefensible to maintain that highly consensual attitudes are beyond the pale in the search for attitude structure. At the soThis content downloaded from 157.55.39.191 on Tue, 11 Oct 2016 05:19:18 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms CONSENSUAL ATTITUDES 351 cietal level policies over which few people disagree-for example, keeping the Constitution-are no less important politically than policies generating sharp disagreements. Similarly, the importance of a political issue to an individual is theoretically independent of the degree of social consensus on that issue. For example, few citizens bother themselves with the possibility of the government selecting their marriage partners, occupation, or procreation habits, yet these are very important to most people. In effect, analyses frequently confuse saliency, or the prominence of an issue of a particular time, with political importance, or the individual's stake in an issue. If we had a society in which important questions were largely settled, we would also find that these issues were of low salience. It is plausible-virtually by definition-that if an extensive coherent attitude structure did exist, it would consist of highly consensual elements. Imagine the results if citizens were asked questions such as "Should the United States be dissolved?" "Should private property be abolished?" or "Should we have a king instead of a president?" No doubt, most citizens would offer the same responses to these questions and we would thus have clear evidence of "attitude structure" (though the ideological common denominator of these items is not apparent). Moreover, for most people, issues such as the existence of private property are importantperhaps even more important than questions involving government action on controversial current issues. These issues are also fundamental for the political system. However, for all the reasons just enumerated, these are not the type of policy issues likely to be found in analyses of attitudinal coherence or ideology. Statistical Problems in Measuring Attitude Coherence Though researchers usually avoid consensual attitudes, it sometimes occurs, especially within subsamples, that the data are distributed in a highly modal way. Under such circumstances, some common measures of association used to show attitude interrelatedness either understate the degree of coherence, misrepresent the character of this relationship, or both. This is not so much an inherent weakness of such measures, but rather more of a disjuncture between statistical properties and the hypotheses under examination. Since analyses employing measures of statistical association differ in the specific statistics used, our discussion is fairly general though particular measures of association will receive special attention. Perhaps the most important disjuncture concerns the difference between attitudinal consistency and high correlations. These two notions are frequently used almost interchangeably, but each implies something quite different. Attitude consistency commonly means that, say, if one has a liberal (or conservative) position on issue X, one is also liberal (conThis content downloaded from 157.55.39.191 on Tue, 11 Oct 2016 05:19:18 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 352 ROBERT WEISSBERG Table 1. Hypothetical Relationships between Dichotomous Variables Table Ja (Random Association) Table l b Table I c