The Validity and Reliability of Measures of Right-Wing Authoritarianism in South Africa

Abstract

In this article we examine the findings of three studies of right-wing authoritarianism conducted in South Africa. The main aim of the article is to report on the validity and reliability of measures of right-wing authoritarianism across three samples, namely a group of police officers, a group of students at a historically English university and a group of students at a historically Afrikaans university. Two measures of authoritarianism were used: the 30-item version of Altemeyer's (1981, 1988) Right-wing Authoritarianism (RWA) scale and the 14-item version of Altemeyer's RWA scale developed by Duckitt (1993a) for use in South African samples. Participants were also given measures of conservatism, prejudice and political beliefs. These scales were then subjected to analyses of internal consistency, factor analysis and correlational analysis. The findings depart somewhat from previous studies in this area in that they do not show the levels of validity and reliability reported in other contexts, nor do these measures perform as theoretically indicated by Altemeyer (1981, 1988) and Duckitt (1989, 1991a). Across all three samples, low correlations were found with measures of prejudice, conservatism and political party preferences. In addition, the three-component model (authoritarian aggression, authoritarian submission and conventionalism) proposed by these authors did not emerge in factor analysis. These findings cause the authors to question the use of RWA scales in South Africa, with a number of implications for authoritarian research in this context.

Collective Rights and Personal Freedoms: A Discursive Analysis of Participant Accounts of Authoritarianism

“…The quantitative findings of this study are reported elsewhere (see Gray & Durrheim, 2006). In brief, the mean RWA score for the police sample was 186.78 (range 102–240), and the mean for the student sample was 167.22 (range 64–226).…”

Validating a Measure of Productive Organisational Energy in the South African Context

“…This results in the instrument being less valid for specific cultural groups. Although research has confirmed that some psychometric instruments developed in other countries are valid when applied in the South African context (Storm & Rothmann, 2003), there have also been multiple instances where instruments which were not adapted for use in the South African context resulted in difficulties with reliability and validity (Gray & Durrheim, 2006;Meiring et al, 2006). This can be attributed to the fact that an individual's subjective culture provides the basis through which they perceive their social environment, which in turn discourages certain behaviors and cultivates others (Anastasi, cited in Schaap, Buys, & Olckers, 2003).…”

Adaptação transcultural e estrutura fatorial da versão brasileira da escala Right-Wing Authoritarianism

“…Etchezahar, 2012). Tendo em vista que o autoritarismo é conceituado como uma atitude social (Duckitt et al, 2010) é plausível que os instrumentos que o avaliem variem conforme a sociedade muda, como já evidenciado pela literatura (Gray & Durrheim, 2006). Logo, é fundamental a reavaliação das propriedades psicométricas da EAD periodicamente, assim como em diferentes populações, as quais podem apresentar características sociodemográfi cas diferentes da amostra do presente estudo e consequentemente manifestar o autoritarismo de diferentes formas.…”

“…Enquanto as versões adaptadas para a Argentina (Etchezahar, 2012) e para a Turquia (Güldü, 2011) apresentaram estrutura bifatorial, a versão adaptada para a África do Sul (Duckitt, 1993) apresentou estrutura unifatorial. Em estudo recente, a EAD adaptada para a África do Sul (Duckitt, 1993) teve suas propriedades psicométricas reavaliadas e se verifi cou que ela apresentou estrutura trifatorial com índices inadequados de consistência interna (Gray & Durrheim, 2006). Portanto, há uma variação intercultural e temporal na estrutura fatorial das diferentes escalas que avaliam autoritarismo que aponta para infl uência da cultura no construto autoritarismo e realça a necessidade de avaliação das propriedades psicométricas do instrumento em diferentes contextos.…”