Qualifications to Generalized Absolutes: “Approval of Hitting” Questions on the GSS

An analysis of "approval of hitting" questions on the General Social Surveys finds evidence of correlated error. Respondents frequently ignore the absolute phrasing of questions. As a result, they often contradict themselves by approving of speciflc uses of hitting after having rejected any use of such force. These contradictors tend to have lower education and less support for punitive responses on other items. Tom W. Smith is a Senior Study Director, National Opinion Research Center. This research was done for the General Social Survey project directed by James A. Davis. The project is supported by the National Science Foundation, Grant No. SOC77-03279. Public Opinion Quarterly Vol. 45:224-230 ? 1981 by The Trustees of Columbia University Published by Elsevier North-Holland, Inc. 0033-362X/81/0045-224/$2.50 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.92 on Wed, 22 Jun 2016 06:48:48 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms QUALIFICATIONS TO GENERALIZED ABSOLUTES 225 It would seem that if respondents said "no" to the possibility of "any situation you can imagine" in which hitting was approved, they should say "no" to each of the specific situations. However, when we cross-tabulate the general and the situational questions, we find that the vast majority of disapprovers on the general questions actually approved of hitting on one or more of the situational questions. On police hitting, 86 percent of those who disapproved of hitting on the general question approved of hitting in one or more of the four specific situations. On average, they approved of 1.52 specific situations. On man hitting, 83.7 percent of the absolute disapprovers approved of hitting in one or more of the five situations and they averaged 1.82 approvals. These results suggest that many respondents are not 'taking the general questions literally. Rather than responding to the absolute phrase "are there any situations you can imagine," many respondents are answering the question as if it were "in most situations you can think of' or "in general."' This pattern is illustrated by a Guttman scaling experiment. When we ran the general and four situational police items in a Guttman scale and allowed SPSS to order the items according to the best Guttman fit, the general item did not appear as the hardest item (i.e., the item for which it was most difficult to say "no") but appeared as the middle item in the scale. Likewise, on adult male hitting it was the fourth hardest of the six items. This is, of course, just where we would expect a middling question on "in general' or "more often than not" to appear compared to situational questions with more or less difficult reasons for approval. This divergence between what the general questions ask and what many people are answering may come from a literal failure of imagination. When asked about "any situation you can imagine," many people simply may not think of a situation where they would approve of hitting. When presented with a specific situation that is widely regarded as a legitimate use of hitting (e.g., self-defense), they indicate approval, thereby contradicting their response to the general 1 Of course, not all cases having a "no" to the general question and a "yes" to a specific question indicate a respondent did not mean his "no" response. It is possible that the respondent did not mean what he said on the specific situation rather than the general question. This is undoubtedly true in some cases, but we doubt that this is the common pattern. In a majority of cases a respondent contradicts his general response on two or more specific situations. It is unlikely that the respondent managed to contradict himself twice without meaning to. In addition, the level of "don't knows" indicates that respondents have greater difficulty with the general questions rather than the specific. Finally, there are, of course, a number of random transference errors, but these should be minuscule. In sum, we expect the majority of contradictions to represent cases where the respondent's response to the general question did not accurately reflect his true attitude. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.92 on Wed, 22 Jun 2016 06:48:48 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms