Development and Validation of Novel Scales to Measure Cultural Worldviews in the United Kingdom

Rooted in cultural theory, cultural worldviews describe preferences for societal structure along two orthogonal dimensions of sociality. The vertical “grid” dimension represents hierarchism versus egalitarianism, while the... [ view full abstract ]

Rooted in cultural theory, cultural worldviews describe preferences for societal structure along two orthogonal dimensions of sociality. The vertical “grid” dimension represents hierarchism versus egalitarianism, while the horizontal “group” dimension represents individualism versus communitarianism. Numerous studies conducted in the US show that such worldviews are predictive of patterns of risk perception across various risk objects, e.g. climate change. However, existing measures of these constructs were developed in the US cultural context and have demonstrated poorer psychometric properties and predictive power with UK samples. This paper presents the results of a four-stage development and validation of novel scales to measure cultural worldviews more sensitively in the UK context. It is hoped that the final instrument will allow for a more valid examination of the relationship between risk perceptions and cultural worldviews in the UK.

Stage 1 consisted in generating an initial pool of 55 hierarchy-egalitarianism items, and 21 individualism-communitarianism items. These were formulated with reference to existing cultural worldview measures and findings from recent surveys of social attitudes in the UK.

In stage 2 items were evaluated through one-to-one cognitive interviews with 24 participants. These involved participants responding to items on a 6-point agreement scale before answering questions designed to ascertain 1) how items were interpreted, 2) the cognitions underlying participant responses, and 3) difficulties participants had in generating item responses. Resultant data was analysed on an item-by-item basis, culminating in 53 item reformulations and 17 deletions.

In stage 3, the revised cultural worldview items were administered to 190 participants in an online survey. Exploratory factor analysis allowed for identification and elimination of cross-loading items. Further deletions were made based on multiple considerations such as factor loadings, scale item-total correlations and item-response skew. Subsequently, a 24-item hierarchy-egalitarianism scale and 12-item individualism-communitarianism scale were compiled and carried to the fourth stage.

In the final stage these scales were included in an online nationally representative survey of 1500 participants. The survey allowed assessment of the convergent and discriminant validity of the scales using of a number of established measures of related constructs, including political attitudes and value orientations. Measures of risk perceptions towards various types of risk objects were included to determine whether scores on the cultural worldview scales predicted patterns of risk perception posited by cultural theory. Initial results indicate that scores predicted risk perceptions in patterns hypothesised. Scale reliabilities, factor structure and relationships with related constructs will be presented and discussed.