The structure of social attitudes in Japanese university students in the 1980's

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to explore a hierarchy model of social attitudes in Japanese university students (male=279, female=166) by item analysis based upon factor analytic method. The correlation matrix among 8 attitude scales was analyzed by principal component analysis. Four primary factors: Political Conservatism vs. Progressivism (PC), Conservatism vs. Progressivism in Social Norms (SC) (the above two kinds of conservatism factors are positively correlated). Liberalistic, Democratic Pacifism (LDP) and Political Apathy (PA) were obtained by Promax rotation. The second-order orthogonal factors: General Conservatism vs. Progressivism (GC) and General Liberalistic, Democratic Pacifism (GL) were extracted from the primary factor correlations. The results suggest that the basic structure of Liberalism (L) and Conservatism (C) is fundamentally two-dimensional. Moreover, the so-called Liberalism vs. Conservatism continuum such as the two scales for Agreement with the Tenno System and Armaments is correlated with the C factors (PC and SC) positively, and with the L factor (LDP) negatively.