A 1Zitem scale of social conservatism

As argued elsewhere (Henningham, 1995), conservatism scales are unlike other measures of attitudes in that they need a “use by” date. The community’s evolving values, as well as changes in fashion and in acceptable behaviour, render scales measuring conservatism-liberalism products of their day and age. This is obvious by considering some of the items in the original “catchphrase” scale of Wilson and Patterson (1968+jazz, casual living, computer music, beatniks, chaperones and pyjama parties are all unsuitable terms today. Although later revised (Wilson, 1975) many items which are strangely discordant with the late 1990s include women judges, apartheid, co-education and birth control. Even in Kirton’s (1978) shortened alternative form of the original 50-item scale, many of the dated items remained, and the original items have continued to be cited in the 1990s (e.g. Truett et al., 1992; Melville & Cornish, 1993). The wording of items aside, it is doubtful whether a scale as long as 50 items is necessary to tap conservative values, and in field situations where many variables are under examination, reliable shorter scales are always welcome. Kirton (1978) demonstrated acceptable reliability with a 30-item version of Wilson and Patterson’s scale. More recently, Collins and Hayes (1993) have proposed a 16-item scale, although their approach differs from that of other scales in the Wilson and Patterson tradition in that a five-point response option (strongly agree to strongly disagree) was offered to respondents. In the following application of a conservatism scale to an Australian population sample (maintaining the traditional “yesno” response pattern), a 27-item scale was tested, subsequently reduced to a 12-item scale.