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Adapting Dawson's Traditional versus Western Attitudes Scale and Presenting Some New Information from Africa
Author(s) -
WOBER MALLORY
Publication year - 1971
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.2044-8260.1971.tb00722.x
Subject(s) - consistency (knowledge bases) , scale (ratio) , comprehension , psychology , sierra leone , salient , presentation (obstetrics) , element (criminal law) , work (physics) , social psychology , medicine , sociology , geography , socioeconomics , computer science , political science , engineering , law , mechanical engineering , cartography , artificial intelligence , radiology , programming language
This paper extends work on a compound scale of Traditional and Western values, developed by Dawson (1967) in Sierra Leone. Eighteen topics yield scores on westernness of response for each topic; overall subscale scores for approval of Traditional and Western items are also available. Two groups of respondents are manual workers and clerks, in a South Nigerian industry. Differences from Dawson's studies include: some shortening and changes in the scale; ‘logicality’ in the responses received, in that approval of western items by a group is accompanied by some rejection of traditional ones; lack of whole‐scale high correlations between western attitudes and rated work efficiency. It is suggested that the method of presentation differed between the two studies and may have affected results. An element of comprehension may have affected Dawson's studies which could be partly responsible for strong correlations between measures of attitude and work efficiency; this element of comprehension may not have been so salient in the present study. A similarity with Dawson's findings is that some signs of ‘resurgence’ of less western views is found among some more (western‐)educated people. There is also similar evidence of dissimilar attitudes being held at once by certain groups, on certain topics. The overall design of Dawson's device is presented as being very useful and capable of suggesting sensitive pointers to an area of study which may question one of the basic assumptions of balance or consistency theories of attitudes.