Social Attitudes and Social Class

Abstract

In the course of an extensive survey, made by the Audience Research Department of the B.B.C., some 2000 male and female subjects, the members of the B.B.C. Viewing Panel, were administered an attitude questionnaire containing 28 questions. Subjects were divided into three social‐class groups (middle class, skilled working class, unskilled working class), three age‐groups and two sex‐groups; answers to the questionnaire items were correlated and factor‐analysed for the resulting 18 groups separately. Sex and age did not seem to have any great effect on the patterns of intercorrelations emerging, and consequently three samples were constructed of subjects in the three social‐class groups in such a way that proportions of men and women, and of the three age‐groups, were equal. These three groups were then submitted to a factorial analysis, and factor similarity indices were calculated between the two higher‐order factors which emerged for each group to indicate to what extent attitude structure might differ from class to class; no systematic differences were observed, other than a tendency for attitudes to be more strongly structured in the higher social‐class groups. In view of the great similarities between the three solutions for the class groups separately, they were combined into one group, and a factor analysis carried out on the resulting correlations. The structure observed was found to be very similar to that reported earlier in The Psychology of Politics, although an alternative descriptive system to the R and T factor system is also discussed. Age was found to correlate with conservatism, male sex with toughmindedness. The results are interpreted as suggesting that there have been no systematic changes in the structure of social attitudes in this country in the 20 years that have elapsed since the research published in The Psychology of Politics was carried out.