20
When there were multiple items on this sub-dimension and they showed continuity over a
couple of years, they appeared to constitute a stable sub-dimension on ‘public order’. For
example:
How about taking part in protest meetings or marches that are permitted by
local authorities. (1968, 1972)
Some people are primarily concerned with doing everything possible to protect
the legal rights of those accused of committing crimes. Others feel that it is more
important to stop criminal activity even at the risk of reducing the rights of the
accused. (1972, 1976)
This led us to hypothesize two clear sub-clusters, a major and a minor one, as
characterizing attitudes in this area:
•
The major sub-dimension involved civil behavior, where the continuum runs
from social traditionalism to rational libertarianism. Traditionalists accept the
received and conventional definition of social norms, and of the behavior that
should follow from them. Libertarians insist that individuals should be free to
work out these matters, both norms and behavior, for themselves.
•
The main secondary sub-dimension to cultural values and social policy then
involved criminal behavior instead. There was no serious continuum between
pro- and anti- crime. Yet there was a clear distinction between those most
concerned with personal responsibilities and social control, versus those most
concerned with individual rights and personal autonomy.
In the realm of social policy, then, confirmatory factor analysis had to address yet
a different set of responsibilities. All the exploratory analyses before 1972 produced a
single dimension to social policy, though all lacked multiple items on our two
hypothesized sub-dimensions. All exploratory analyses from 1972 onward instead
produced these two sub-dimensions, along with one or another non-scaling items. So the
task of a confirmatory analysis was to see whether this second set of outcomes could be
collapsed into one dimension, or whether the results of the first set ought to be treated,
Convention