The structure of attitudes to a single object: Adapting Criterial Referents Theory to measure attitudes to ‘woman’

Abstract

Kerlinger's (1984) Criterial Referents Theory (CRT) is a theory of the structure of political attitudes to many objects. We modify and develop the theory to provide an account of the structure of attitudes to a single object—the social category ‘woman’. A three-level hierarchical structure was proposed, spanning from principles (similar to Kerlinger's ‘ideologies’) through identities to behavioural referents. An 80-item scale was used to examine this hypothesized structure. Factor analysis of data from 239 subjects revealed a second-order factor structure which confirmed our structural hypotheses. Subscales constructed from the scale were related to scores on the Women in Society Questionnaire and to scores from a sentence-completion task. The results clearly indicate that existing ‘attitudes to women’ scales, which assume a bipolar unidimensional structure, are inadequate, and that CRT is capable of accommodating structures of attitudes to single objects.