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The Attitudes of Students towards International Affairs
Author(s) -
MORRISON A.,
McINTYRE D.
Publication year - 1966
Publication title -
british journal of social and clinical psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.479
H-Index - 92
eISSN - 2044-8260
pISSN - 0007-1293
DOI - 10.1111/j.2044-8260.1966.tb00950.x
Subject(s) - conservatism , semantic differential , politics , political radicalism , variance (accounting) , psychology , social psychology , graduate students , contrast (vision) , differential (mechanical device) , political science , economics , accounting , pedagogy , law , computer science , engineering , artificial intelligence , aerospace engineering
Graduate students rated sixteen concepts concerning the countries, political leaders and real or assumed policies of the East‐West blocs on seven evaluative scales of the semantic differential. From each student a pooled rating from the scales was obtained for each of the concepts. Correlations were run between the sets of concept ratings and the resulting matrix analysed by the method of principal components. Three interpretable factors were extracted, accounting for 50 per cent of the total variance. The first two factors may be interpreted respectively as evaluations of the countries and political leaders of the Western and Eastern blocs. Furthermore, they show that attitudes to East‐West are orthogonal, and not opposed. The third factor appears to contrast practical policies with more general social and political ideals. Results are discussed in relation to commonly reported findings of dimensions of Radicalism‐Conservatism and Tough‐Tendermindedness in previous studies of social and political attitudes.