PAPER PRESENTED AT THE 19TH ANNUAL SCIENTIFIC MEETING OF INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY OF POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY
June 30 - July 3, 1996,
Vancouver, Canada.
PETRENKO, Victor; MITINA, Olga
Summary
During the last five years in the Psychological faculty of the Moscow State University under the lead of Prof. Petrenko special investigations of the political consciousness have been undertaken. These studies were carried out in different cities of Russia and the countries of the CIS, using a technique, traditionally used by psychologists for research in the fields traditionally investigated by sociologists and political psychologists.
Our method is based on Osgood's semantic differential technique and Kelly's repertory grid technique, and incorporates theories of personal construct psychology and multidimensional scaling. It allows the researcher to apply factor analysis to questions used in a survey, and thus identify the underlying factors. When the data are presented graphically, these factors appear as the coordinating axes of a multidimensional space, and the positions of those who participated in the survey appear as coordinate points in this semantic space.
In this paper we describe some experiments in which we assessed political thought. The first was conducted just prior to the political earthquake that shook the Soviet Union and the rest of the world in 1991 and the second just prior to the attempted coup in Moscow in 1993, the third took place in 1995.
Introduction in the Psychosemantics method
The apparatus of psychosemantics is used for our studies (see Petrenko 1983, 1988; Shmelev 1983). In American literature this field of political studies is known as the "Theory of personal constructs and repertoire grids" (J.Kelly 1963) and the Semantic Differential (Ch.Osgood 1957). The authors have had much experience in applying a psychosemantic approach to the investigation of political consciousness (see works by Petrenko, Mitina 1991, 1994, 1995a,b; Petrenko, Mitina, Shevchuk 1993, Petrenko, Mitina, Brown 1995).
The task of psychosemantic includes reconstruction of the individual system of meanings, through which the subject perceives the world, other people, him or her self, and study its genesis, structure and functioning. Psychosemantic model originally used in individual psychotherapy for the description of the internal image of the world of the single subject, have subsequently received wide distribution for researches of different images of the world of the "integrated" subject (public consciousness) and in particular for the description of specific character of political world perception of people, reconstruction of the system of political values, description of stereotypes of interpersonal perception and standards of political thought and behavior.
An experimental research using psychosemantic method includes the next important steps:
A primary task for the new field of psychology in Russia - political psychology - is to understand how people think about political issues. One way of understanding how people think is to examine their categorization of events. The structure of the categories that people use and the positive and negative feelings that they attach to categories provide a way of studying how meaning is assigned to an event.
Categorization is a "system of meanings" that psychologists can take advantage of as a technique for understanding cognitive processes (Leontiev, 1977). The study of how people organize concepts into categories reveals the way they structure meaning because concepts and the labels people use for them are the building materials of consciousness. The origin, content, and structure of the way individuals store information in categories of meaning is the framework for the research method known as "psychosemantics." As its name literally implies, psychosemantics is a way of studying the psychology of meaning (Petrenko, 1983; 1988; Shmelev, 1983).
Psychosemantics has a long history in psychology and includes concepts and techniques developed by the American psychologists Osgood (Osgood, 1971; Osgood, Suci, Tannenbaum, 1957) and Kelly (1955) and is consistent with the principles of the psychological theory of constructivism. Russian psychosemantics is based on the methodological and theoretical foundations introduced by Lev Vygotsky, Alexei Leontiev, and Alexander Luria. Psychosemantics is based on a system of word meanings (including nonverbal meanings as well) that is analyzed with multivariate mathematical procedures such as factor analysis, cluster analysis, and other multidimensional scaling techniques.
The task for modern experimental psychosemantics is to map the structure of meaning that individuals and groups use so that we can understand the way people think about political (in our case) issues and predict how they are likely to act. We are still a long way from the goal of making accurate predictions about anything as complex as how people will act or react, especially in times of great change, such as that we are currently experiencing on the political scene.
Groups of individuals who think in similar ways share a particular mental picture of the world. According to this model, members of the same political party organize their meaning structures in similar ways. They use their "picture" or understanding of events that occur in the world to make decisions.
Kelly (1955) introduced the notion of "personal construct" to refer to the way individuals construct their own implicit theories of personality. This notion can be expanded to describe the meanings that groups members have in common with each other. In the studies we report here, we use the idea of personal construct in ways that are different from those originally proposed by Kelly. For Kelly, constructs were bipolar dimensions. Meaning was assigned by aligning a concept on multiple scales that were marked with opposite description on either end. In the bipolar model any idea, for example, democracy, could be described by finding where it lies along multiple bipolar dimensions such as good bad, just unjust, many few, open closed, beautiful ugly, etc. The model of constructs that we use in our research conceptualizes meaning as a correlation between descriptions of the construct and underlying dimensions that are important in determining how we organize information. This conceptualization is contained in the mathematical models that we use to analyze our data.
The methods of experimental psychosemantics allow the researcher to gain access to knowledge about how people think that is not available to the subjects themselves. In psychosemantics, the task for the individual subject is to provide some classification about a topic. The response could be a judgment of similarity, an indication of the extent to which he agrees or disagrees with a statement, or some other association. There are many different types of responses that are possible with this technique. On the basis of numerous responses to a range of stimuli, a matrix of data is obtained from each subject. The matrix can then be used with any analytic technique that is based on matrix algebra. There are many possible ways to analyze these matrices including a variety of multidimensional procedures such as factor analysis, cluster analysis, latent variable modeling, and others that are familiar to those with a good background in data analytic techniques. As result the researcher can find "bundles" of interconnected meaning that form the coordinate axes of semantic space. The number of independent factors that emerge from an analysis defines the number of dimensions that are used to locate meanings in semantic space. According to this geometric model of the mind, the greater the number of independent factors that emerge from an analysis, the greater the cognitive complexity of the individual, group or social consciousness. Another parameter of semantic space, in addition to the number of factors or dimensions, is the importance of the factor. Some factors are stronger determinants of how people think than others. (Mathematically, the power of a factor is the proportion of the variability in the responses that can be accounted for by the factor.)
The structures that are found in a data matrix are interpreted as the categorical structures of the subjects' semantic space. These structures are the frameworks or skeletons of the mind that are not available for self observation or introspection just as the rules of grammar that adults use so easily cannot be articulated, but nevertheless guide the use of a language.
Given the background information that was just provided and the explanation of the experimental techniques and how the results are interpreted, we turn now to a description of our studies in which we used these techniques to provide a picture drawn from inside the Russian mind of how Russians think about politics.
The 1991 Experiment: A Map of the Political Mindscape Immediately Prior to the Disintegration of the USSR
We began our studies of Russian political consciousness just prior to the disintegration of the USSR and formation of the independent republics that began in August, 1991. (Additional information about these studies can be found in Russian language articles by Petrenko and Mitina, 1991). The subjects were 299 individuals living in and around Moscow who were selected on the basis of their identification as a leader in one of the 32 political parties and political groups that were in existence during the spring and summer of 1991, prior to the August 1991 "revolution."
Each respondent was offered a questionnaire consisting of 212 political statements. They were asked to indicated the extent to which they agreed or disagreed with each statement by marking it " 1" if they agreed, "-1" if they disagreed, and "0" if they neither agreed not disagreed. If the respondent did not understand a statement or did not want to respond to a particular statement, then "-" was used as the response.
Descriptors. The 212 statements on the questionnaire were selected from a variety of political sources and covered the spectrum of political thought. They were taken from political declarations from the various parties and movements, the United Nations Universal Declaration on Human Rights, excerpts from political speeches (given between 1988 and February 1991), and presentations made before the Supreme Soviet. The source of each statement was not indicated on the questionnaire. Topics concerned foreign policy, new political thinking, arms reduction and withdrawal from Eastern Europe, understanding the multiparty system, attitudes toward Marxist-Leninist ideology, religion, economic reforms, private ownership, and private and collective farming. Some of the statements reflected problems in the state structure of the Soviet Union, sovereignty of the republics, national self-awareness, national language and cultures, and the inviolability of personal and human rights. The statements were selected to cover a wide range of political view points and contained opposing opinions.
Objects. Data were tabulated on the basis of party affiliation with the mean response for each statement computed for each of the 32 parties.
Data analyze. The mathematical model that was used to determine the factor structure of semantic space is the method of principal components with varimax factor axis rotation (Uberla, 1977). Based on these methods, we identified four factors which account for 37, 18, 12, and 7 percent of the variability in responses.
Interpretation. To interpret each factor we analyzed statements that loaded on each of the factors and their factor loadings. The term "factor loading" has a specific mathematical meaning, which can be thought of as the degree to which the meaning of the statement and the meaning represented by the factor are the same. The sign of the factor loadings show which of two opposite poles of a factor the statement refers to.
[ Factor 1: Unity Statehood Confederation of Sovereign States.
The statements that load on the first factor seem to share a concern with issues of unity in a single state or a confederation of sovereign states. We point out that preparations for a referendum on the preservation of the USSR were occurring during the time the questionnaire was being administered (1991). Not surprisingly, this dimension of political thought emerged as the primary factor in the structural organization of thoughts about statehood.
[ Factor 2. Acceptance Rejection of communist ideology, especially economic aspects of the ideology.
The joint representation on one factor of ideological and economic concerns is probably because economic issues are largely determined by ideology for communists, so they co-exist as a single dimension of meaning. Also grouped under this factor are statements concerning religious ideology and the demands of a free economy such as the right to individual farming and reducing aid to foreign countries. It is noteworthy that based on these results, we find that in purely ideological terms, the pole marked by Marxism-Leninism ideology is opposite to the pole that represents religious orientation. In the minds of the respondents, religious beliefs and actions are the antithesis of communist ideology. The apparent absence of an identifiable ideology that has a meaning that is the opposite of communist ideology (other than religion) is probably due to the fact that democrats do not present a clearly articulated alternative ideology except for their support of freedom in political, economic, and intellectual spheres.
The relative position of the political parties in 1991 on these two dimensions is shown in Figure 1. The coordinates of each party in "Semantic Space" is coincident with the location of the initial letter in the party name.
------Insert Fig 1. About Here---------
Because four dimensions emerged from the data analysis, the depiction of the political parties in four-dimensional space is shown with two two-dimensional plots (Figure 1 and 2).
In interpreting Figure 1, parties that are close to each other in the graph are similar in the ways their leaders think (the respondents in the study were party leaders) and those that are far from each other are dissimilar. The fact that the quadrant defined by F1 and F2- is empty shows that there are no parties whose leaders show the logically inconsistent positions of both supporting a confederation and accepting communist ideology. As might be expected and can be seen in Figure 1, the most polar views on the second (ideological) factor were exhibited by the Communist Initiative, the Marxist Platform in CPSU, World War II Veterans, The United Workers Front and the Communist Party of the RSFSR, on one end, and the representatives of the Memorial Society, the Social-Democratic and the Republican Party of Russia, members of the Christian-Democratic Union and Socialists-Narodniks, on the other. In addition to the democratic bloc, the communist ideology was rejected by National-Patriots: Monarchists, The Democratic party of Soviet Union, the Moskva United Republican Committee and the Pamyat Front. It is interesting to note that the Communists for Democracy and the CPSU-Neutrals, the party for those who are tired of political parties, were discreet in their rejection of communist ideology as expressed in the pro-communist statements made by traditionalist communists and included in the questionnaire.
------Insert Fig 2. About Here---------
[ Factor 3. "Human Rights."
The statements that load on this factor concern the "Third Basket" of the Helsinki Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. This "basket" or theme comprises some of the items from the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights. The "pro-human rights" position is represented by the positive pole of Factor 3 with the rejection of human rights at the opposite end.
[ Factor 4. Advocates opponents of democratic forms of government.
The Figure 2 shows a graph of semantic space as defined by Factor 3 and 4. Notice that most of the parties load positively on human rights showing that most parties advocate a pro-human rights position. The most pronounced in their protection of human rights are the Constitutional Democrats, the Democratic Party of Russia, and Socialists (Populists). The members of CPSU supporting Gorbachev are also among the parties with most extreme loadings on Factor 3. A negative attitude regarding human rights was exhibited by the national-patriotic movements, including the Russian Movement, The All-Union Society for Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments, The Socio-Political Council "Civil Consensus," Monarchists, and especially the Pamyat Front. Thus, rejection of human rights under current conditions manifests itself primarily in the nationalistic political parties.
The Communist party of the Soviet Union split into Democrats (Communists for Democracy and supporters of Gorbachev) and anti-democrats (the Communist Party of Russia, Marxist Platform and Communist Initiative) in the way it loaded onto Factor 4.
Each factor is a probable line of opposition between the parties, but at the same time each factor presents an opportunity for possible association and unification on basic meanings and basic values. Thus, the acceptance of personal values and human rights (Factor 3) by the majority of the respondents (including officers and war veterans) is a hopeful sign of getting consensus on the other political aspects too.
Data were also analyzed using the statistical techniques of cluster analysis. In cluster analysis, we used the responses of the party leaders to determine a Euclidean metric that reflects the similarity among the political parties. The result is a tree of similarity such that parties that are near to each other are more similar in their belief systems than parties that are far from each other. The mathematical procedure we used to form clusters of similar parties is a standard method known as "minimal contrast" (Duran Odel, 1974; Ryzin, 1977). The resulting tree of similarity is a semantic mapping of similarity among the parties that should correspond to patterns of partnerships and rivalries as they exist in real life. The similarity tree is shown in Figure 3.
---------------Insert Figure 3 About Here-----------------
Perusal of Figure 3 reveals several striking facts about the structure of political parties in 1991. First, key blocs of parties can be found in the tree structure. In understanding the tree structure shown in Figure 3, begin with those parties that are grouped in top 1/3 of the figure. Those parties that appear closely linked to the Democratic Russia Movement, in fact, are close in terms of their political guidelines. As shown in Figure 3, there are many different organized parties that are linked to the Democratic Russia Movement, and these parties are similar in political spirit. On another branch, but still nearby, are the Anarchists and The Greens Party. Although the names of the parties may suggest that they are ideologically distant from each other, in fact, these two parties have had the same leaders at different times, so their appearance on close branches of this tree reflects this similarity.
Findings with regard to the various communist parties also reflect realities. The traditionalist Communists (Communist Party of Russia, Marxist Platform, and Communist Initiative) form a compact bloc in their unanimity, which is closely related to The United Workers Front and World War II Veterans parties. A high degree of unanimity, both within the party platforms and the cluster that resulted from our analysis, points to a stable political formation with its own vision and approach to political developments.
Finally, a bloc of national-patriots (The Socio-Political Council "Civil Consensus," the Russkaya Academy of Sciences, Monarchists, Moskva United Republican Committee, the Democratic Party of the Soviet Union, and the Pamyat National-Patriotic Front) is characterized by a rather fuzzy structure reflecting its heterogeneity and the absence of common leaders and orientations.
The categorical structure of political parties as represented by the cluster analysis is a cognitive reality that characterizes the affinity of the party leaders. It reflects the existing political groupings and alliances among the political parties. These structures allow us to predict the dynamics of political processes and social development. For example, new political parties often have short lives. By using the results of cluster analysis, we can predict which party will gain in membership when some other party disappears or whether two or more parties are sufficiently similar in their ideologies so that mergers would be successful.
The 1993 Experiment: A Map of the Political Mindscape
There were unprecedented changes in Russian political life in the years immediately following 1991. In order to capture the structure of the changes in political thought, we conducted a second experiment in 1993 just prior to the attempted coup by Parliament against President Yeltsin. The timing of the second experiment, like that of the first, may seem fortuitous to those outside of Russia, but there were ample signs of change within Russia, so the timing was not merely "lucky." In order to assess political thinking in 1993, we used the same methods as in the 1991 study, but the content of the stimulus materials was, in part, changed to reflect all of the changes in the political scene. Those statements from 1991 questionnaire that still represented major issues were retained.
A second questionnaire was drawn up with statements relevant to the current political situation in 1993. These statements included such topics as the Constitution and State system, problems of foreign and home policy, attitudes toward the reform of the armed forces, juridical aspects of the economy, private property, political freedom and civil rights, questions of national policy and interethnic relations, problems of culture, language, religion, and selected topics from the All-Russian referendum of April 1993 concerning trust in the President (Yeltsin) and support for the policy of reform. The respondents were 1059 persons selected from 67 political parties or groups that were active in Russian in 1993. The procedure of answering was the same.
The data were analyzed with factor analytic techniques. Four independent factors emerged accounting, respectively, for 21, 17, 13, and 6 percent of the variance. Figure 5,6 shows the relative position of the major parties in 1993 in the four-dimensional space defined by these factors.
------ Insert Figure 5,6 About Here---------
The factors are described as:
[ Factor 1. Support for Yeltsin' reforms Rejection of Yeltsin's reforms.
[ Factor 2. Free market economy planned economy.
[ Factor 3. Human rights are of primary importance A strong unitary state is of primary importance.
[ Factor 4. Accept communist ideology Reject communist ideology.
Clusters of Parties
As shown in figure 4, in 1993, parties grouped into branches with a primary division along the dimension of whether or not they supported Yeltsin.
------ Insert Figure 4 About Here-----
Among the strongest supporter were "Anti-fascist Center," "Russia's Choice," and "The Democratic Russia." (These are names of three of the 67 political parties that were included in the 1993 study.) Another grouping consisted of those parties that offered "constructive and gentle" opposition to Yeltsin's reforms. This was a heterogeneous group with some parties opposing the economic and social consequences of the abrupt transition to a free market, such as the "United Fraction of Social-Democratic Party of Russia," "Civil Union," and "Democratic Party of Russia." Other parties in this middle group denounced President Yeltsin for his authoritarianism, "Union of Rebirth of Russia" and "Young Christian Democrats," and others denounced Yeltsin because they believed that greater authoritarianism was needed because of the dangers in superfluous social democratization, "Pamyat." A third cluster consisted of parties that denied state power in any form, including the power of the president. This group included "Anarchists" and several informal political organizations.
As many readers might predict, the fourth branching of parties was comprised of those with strong socialist orientations that are in "irreconcilable opposition" to Yeltsin's reforms. These include the "Party of Labor," the most strongly identified communist political party. This branch of the political tree can be thought of as ranging in color from red to brown to black as the parties aligned in continuous gradations with communists at one end and avowed fascists at the other ("Fascist Party").
[ Our maps of semantic space that allow us to understand and predict political thought are dependent on the way respondents make judgments about the political statements on the questionnaires.
[ To be able to compare political guidelines and build a common semantic space, we selected statements from a wide-ranging political spectrum with the vocabulary used by different political movements.
[ The dimensions of semantic space reflect the cognitive complexity of the respondents' knowledge and thinking about the topics described in the statements. The totality of personal meanings and values can be inferred from the way they categorized topics and the location of topics within their semantic space. The study of political consciousness within the framework of a psychosemantic approach allows us to reconstruct the world as it is perceived by various political communities.
Finding Locations in Semantic Space
We can use this approach to make predictions about the political thinking of single individuals. A new domain of study, which can be called "politicodiagnostics" can be used to infer any individual's political affiliation by determining the pattern of responses the individual gives to statements that have been used to identify underlying factors. Thus, the computer program that we developed jointly with M. Gambaryan makes it possible for any person to check his political orientation by responding to the statements on the questionnaire we have previously described. Once completed, the individual can locate his response patterns in the semantic spaces shown in Figures 1 to find the parties of kindred spirit for himself. In this way, voters who are uncertain as to which of the political parties is closest in philosophy to their own can make this determination by using the new methods of politicodiagnostics.
The Dynamics of Political Mentality
The two studies described above provide two pictures in time of political thinking among representatives from Russia's political parties. But political thinking is in a state of flux, and the two static "snap shots," while revealing in their own right, cannot capture the movement and changes inherent in a swiftly shifting system of meanings. In the years between 1991 and 1993, short in terms of history, but long in the amount of political activity that influenced and reflected Russian political thought, the problems facing Russia underwent radical alterations. The statements in the two questionnaires had to change to reflect the changes in the real world. However, the process by which change is achieved is important in its own right. We need to understand and predict how and in which directions political thoughts will be altered in order to use our data to make political predictions.
How did the political parties change during the two year period of political frenzy between the 1991 revolution and 1993 attempted coup? What dimensions emerge when this period is treated as though it were a single point in time? To answer these questions, we combined the data from the two studies and reanalyzed them to create a new semantic space that was representative of political thought in the period between these two historical events.
In order to combine the data from the 1991 and 1993 studies, we had to make the assumption that the parties that were in existence at both times were stable enough to consider them as bearers of the particular social and political values that they advocated. This assumption is inherent in the individual studies because without it, analysis of party positions would not be meaningful. Those statements that appeared on both questionnaires and those parties and groups that responded to them in 1991 and 1993 formed the data matrix that allowed us to investigate changes in the structure of political thinking during this tumultuous time period.
Based on the methods of factor analysis and axis rotation that were described in the earlier studies, we extracted six factors from the combined data set from 1991 and 1993. The six factors accounted for 27, 25, 16, 8, 6, and 5 percent, respectively, of the total variability in the data. These six factors and their polar descriptors in 1991 and 1993 are shown in Figure 7, 8, 9.
-----Insert Figure 7,8 About Here ------
One way of examining the shift is by comparing the two pie charts shown in Figure 7, 8. The chart on the right shows the proportional contribution of different sorts of semantic factors to political thinking in 1991; the chart on the right shows the same data for 1993.
----Insert Figure 9 about here---
In understanding the shift in political thinking in the period of 1991 and 1993, consider "Factor 1." The primary shift was from a dimension that corresponded to democratic freedoms totalitarianism in 1991 to a dimension that corresponded to liberalism nationalism in 1993. In the two years between the revolution and the 1993 attempted coup, the struggle against totalitarianism and suppression of democratic freedoms changed to more individually oriented liberal values. The conceptual importance of totalitarianism limitations on human rights was replaced by the concern about nationalism. (Concern is meant to have both positive and negative connotations because the importance of a dimension does not indicate its preferred pole.)
The second major dimension of semantic space is shown by a transition from the political/economic decentralization unitary socialist statehood to market economy unitary socialist statehood. The demands for decentralization of political power shifted so the greater emphasis was on a market economy two years later. Conceptually, the opposite of market economy was the unitary socialist state and that is implied within the concept of a single source of political control.
The idea of multiple versus communist ideologies was replaced with a religiosity atheism dimension. The religious aspects of meaning assumed greater significance during this period when there was a great deal of religious activity in Russia. The phenomenal growth in Church attendance during this period shows that it had become a major dimension in political thought.
The fourth factor had no counterpart in 1991. In the period just prior to the attempted overthrow of President Yeltsin by some members of Parliament, most notably Alexander Rutskoi, pro- and anti-Yeltsin forces became polarized. Yeltsin, of course, was associated with the government's actions with regard to problems in Russia and abroad. In general, those respondents who showed support for reform also showed support for Yeltsin, but these variables were only moderately correlated because it was possible to support reform and oppose the specific course of action that Yeltsin took in obtaining reform.
The fifth and sixth factors showed little change between 1991 and 1993. The polarization of self-government and maintaining a strong central government and the economic versus ecological development underwent little change, but they also accounted for much smaller portions of the variance in responses. Although there are separate chapter on environmental/ecological psychology later in this book, we note here that the ideas of ecology were already in the public consciousness in 1991, but they were still relatively unimportant when compared with issues of the economy, religion, and ideology.
The Dynamics of Life Quality in Russia from 1917 to 1995.
Russian citizens' perceptions of the social aspects of life after the Communist Revolution in 1917 have been studied by asking them to evaluate the quality of life under various Governments. Changes in Russians' evaluations were obtained for several aspects of life quality:, material well-being, and social optimism. (See Fig. 10). The influence of age and political orientation of people on the evaluation the past and the present were also analyzed.
----Insert Figure 10 about here---
The subjects were 553 Russians from 17 to 70 years old. Each respondent was asked to indicated from 0 to 5 46 different aspects of living during last 70 years under different governments in the USSR and in Russia.
Objects. 16 different governments (see table)
DIFFERENT DATA GOVERNMENTS Lenin 1917 - 1924 Stalin1 1924 - 1941 Stalin2 1941 - 1945 Stalin3 1945 - 1953 Malenkov 1953 - 1956 Khrushchev 1956 - 1964 Brezhnev1 1964 - 1971 Brezhnev2 1972 - 1982 Andropov 1982 - 1983 Chernenko 1983 - 1984 Gorbachev1 1984 - 1989 Gorbachev2 1989 - 1991 Yelsin1 1991 Yelsin2 1992 - 1993 Yelsin3 1994 Yelsin4 1995
Data analyse. The mathematical model that was used to determine the factor structure of semantic space is the method of principal components with varimax factor axis rotation (Uberla, 1977). Based on these methods, we analysed matrix 4616 and identified three factors.
Interpretation. To interpret each factor we analyzed statements that loaded on each of the factors and their factor loading. The term "factor loading" has a specific mathematical meaning, which can be thought of as the degree to which the meaning of the statement and the meaning represented by the factor are the same. The sign of the factor loading show which of two opposite poles of a factor the statement refers to.
[ Factor 1. Political freedom (52,4Error: invalid valuepar
Factor 1 Factor loading Feeling of personal freedom .98 Possibility to express openly one's own point of view .98 Possibility to take part at the decision making at one's .98 place of work Freedom to go abroad .98 Freedom to change one's work .98 Freedom to confess one's choice of religion .96 To be in control of one's own life .92 To have social mobility: the possibility to move from one .92 social stratum to another Possibility to express one's own creativeness .91 Possibility to chose one's own lifestyle .90 Possibility to have an influence on the politics of the .88 country Freedom to move around the country .75 Feeling the sense of one's purpose .73 Specific for Russia Crime rate .93 The threat of local wars .81 Disappointment in one's life .81 F 1 -- To have beliefs in high ideals --.95 Possibility of government (KGB, CPSU, police) interfere in --.95 one's private life Ecological safety --.93 Feelings of unity with society --.88 The threat of global war --.87 Enjoyment in work --.72 Have confidence in near future --.65
[ Factor 2. Material well-being (39,6Error: invalid valuepar
Factor 2 Factor loadings Social safety .98 Possibility to get quality medical service .98 Possibility to satisfy one's intellectual needs (to go to a .98 theater, a cinema, a museum, to buy interesting books) Good living conditions .96 Possibility to give time to one's family .96 Access to necessary goods in local stores .95 Possibility to have good food .95 To have free time for resting .95 Possibility to get education .93 Laws will be guaranteed .93 A guarantee to have a job .93 Material well-being .92 Possibility to participate in sports .90 A degree of friendliness between people .87 Feeling of self-respect .77 Confidence in the near future .72 Strongness of a family unit .69 Interest in life .57
[ Factor 3. Social optimism (4,3Error: invalid valuepar
Factor 3 Factor loadings Feeling of self-respect .60 Feeling of one's sense of living .58 Factor 3 -- Disappointment in one's life --.48
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