Consensus, Dissensus, and Guttman Scales: The Namoluk Case

Abstract

Separate Guttman scales are developed for each of 109 respondents to a political attitude questionnaire on Namoluk Atoll, Micronesia. These scales are compared to examine the amount of agreement or disagreement among informants concerning the rank order of "difficulty" of the eight political offices that comprise local government. A master scale that sorts individuals into groups on the basis of offices they "pass" is created and the scale types of particular individuals are correlated with personal attributes they possess. This scale is shown to be a reasonably accurate predictor of election outcomes and of the category of persons who will run for which offices on the atoll. Considerable attention is devoted to how one determines reliably whether his data meet the criteria for scalability, and methodological devices are suggested for use by future workers that will largely eliminate the frequent misuse of the Guttman scaling technique in anthropology.