When Perception Strikes Back: Testing Popular Agreement with Blank and Schmidt’s Item Categorization

Abstract

For more than two decades, the work of Blank and Schmidt has greatly influenced empirical research on national attachment. Distinguishing between nationalism, patriotism, and national identity, it rests on a set of item batteries that have since been taken up by numerous researchers. In this contribution, we argue that the categorization of most of these items is inconsistent with the perception of a nonexpert sample and, in some cases, even in direct opposition to it. To substantiate this claim, we present the results of an online survey of German university students (N = 424) who were tasked with assigning all items from Blank and Schmidt’s 1997 article to one of the three categories. As hypothesized, the majority of respondents assigned only a few items correctly—so few that their overall agreement with Blank and Schmidt was even lower than what would normally be expected from a random distribution. We also asked about item understandability and found that while some items were considered relatively difficult to understand, there was no obvious correlation between these and the miscategorized ones. Taking this discrepancy between academic and nonacademic concept use into account can further our understanding of national attachment and help us refine existing survey techniques.