A Critic's Defense of the Criticized

Abstract

J. J. Ray makes two fundamental criticisms of Jim Sidanius' work on the relationship between cognitive structure and political ideology. The central criticism is that Budner's Intolerance of Ambiguity Scale (Budner, 1962) is an invalid measure, thus casting substantial doubt on Sidanius' findings. The second criticism is that Sidanius' findings provide strong support for conclusions which actually contradict Sidanius' interpretation of the data. If the first criticism is sound, then it follows that the second cannot be sustained. Ray has previously demonstrated that Budner's scale has unacceptably low internal reliability (0.49) and that the positive and negative halves of the scale are uncorrelated (Ray, 1981). Clearly, the Budner instrument fails any sensible standard of reliability or validity. While the scale, or at least part of it, may be measuring something, we do not know precisely what it does measure. Consequently, the data resulting from the use of the instrument cannot be used either as proof or disproof of any hypothesis. Interestingly enough, Sidanius may have provided a clue to what, if anything, the Budner scale does measure. Sidanius used the scale as an external criterion to check the construct validity of the various cognitive functioning indices extracted from the battery of tests administered to his subjects. It turned out that only one of the seven factors derived from Budner's scale, need for certainty and uniformity, accounted for most of the correlation with Sidanius' measures of cognitive functioning (Sidanius, 1985, p. 649). The certainty and uniformity factor probably taps lack of cognitive complexity, not intolerance of ambiguity, a guess supported by the fact that the highest correlation (-0.36) between that factor and the measures of cognitive functioning is with a cognitive complexity scale. In any event, regardless of what Budner's scale actually measures, or what the relationship between the certainty/uniformity factor and cognitive functioning is, the fact that Sidanius used an unreliable measure as an