Abstract
Bizumic et al. (2013) have recently shown that attitudes towards peace and war reflect two distinct constructs rather than two poles of a single dimension. We present an attempt at validating the French version of their 16-item Attitudes toward Peace and War Scale (APWS) on five distinct (mainly Belgian) French-speaking samples (total N = 808). Confirmatory factor and criterion validity analyses confirmed that attitudes toward peace and war, although negatively related, are distinct in terms of their antecedents and consequences. On the one hand, antecedents of attitudes toward peace included egalitarian ideological beliefs and empathic concern for others, and consequences included intentions to engage in pro-peace behaviors. On the other hand, antecedents of attitudes toward war included national identification and authoritarian ideological beliefs, and consequences included intentions to engage in pro-war behaviors. Furthermore, both attitudes toward peace and war were, respectively, negatively and positively related to (a right-wing) political orientation. Unexpectedly however, attitudes toward war were positively related to nonegalitarian ideological beliefs and were not related to personal distress. Scores on the translated scale were unrelated to socially desirable responding. In terms of known-groups validity, men had, respectively, more and less positive attitudes toward war and peace than women. Finally, based on exploratory factor analyses, the inclusion of some items for the factorial structure of the measure is questioned and a shortened form of the measure is validated. Overall, these findings are in line with Bizumic et al. and suggest that attitudes toward peace and war also reflect two distinct constructs in a French-speaking population.
Highlights
In view of the preparations of the commemorations marking the centenary of the First World War, resolutions have been drafted and experts have been solicited in order to establish the objectives of these events
We examined the role of socially desirable responding (SDR), as SDR has been identified as a potential confound in self-report research [14]
The APWS was translated according to guidelines suggested by Brislin [46], beginning with a parallel back-translation procedure: In each of two pairs of bilingual psychologists working independently, one translator was asked to translate the original item into French and the other to translate it back into English
Summary
27) as one of the missions of the First World War centenary and as a cornerstone of education for peace What these resolutions and recommendations have in common is the assumption that anti-war messages go a long way toward promoting peaceful attitudes, based on the notion that one can be either in favour of peace or in favour of war but not in favour of both at the same time. Such a conceptualization echoes the dominant perspective on the relationship between attitudes toward peace and war found in the psychological literature. Peace and war attitudes are viewed as polar opposites along the same dimension [4,5] (for a brief review, see [6])
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