Adorno designed the F-scale to detect anti-Semites without mentioning Jews

Evidence

As you may remember, I mentioned a new idea to you which I was brooding over. It is a matter of identifying potential and actual anti-Semites purely by means of indirect indications, i.e. without any questions about Jews or about things which have obvious immediate connnections with anti-Semitism, such as hostility towards blacks, political fascism, etc. The projective items' in the old Berkeley questionnaire already represented a start in this direction. I would like to go considerably beyond that, and produce a non-Jewish’ questionnaire capable of giving statistically reliable information on anti-Semitism. I don’t need to mention its advantages to you in detail. The problem is, of course, to find indirect indications which provide not merely necessary, but also sufficient, conditions for anti-Semitism, i.e. ones for which such a high correlation with present anti-Semitism exists that any possible differences can be disregarded. I picture the method as follows: in a single session, two questionnaires could be distributed in succession, first the non-Jewish one, and then one with questions relating to Jews, ethnocentrism, etc., but including other questions as well, so that even here the real point of the research is not immediately apparent. The responses of each participant on the two questionnaires would then be compared, and the indirect questions in which the highest correlation with anti-Semitism or non-anti-Semitism appears would be gradually filtered out, so that a highly reliable indirect research tool would be produced. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1573

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains the actual genesis and logic of the F-scale as indirect measurement, a key Frankfurt instrument.
• QUESTION: Does Adorno here claim the indirect method as his own new idea, at tension with the Hawthorne/Berkeley predecessors? The ‘projective items’ admission suggests continuity.
• XREF: connects to: Adorno’s F-scale methodology stripped the theory of its context; F Scale scores strongly tracked anti-Semitism and ethnocentrism but less so political conservatism; The F Scale items derive from fascist writings and clinical interview data — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 469 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• The F Scale items derive from fascist writings and clinical interview data #expands (0.82) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 469
• Adorno’s F-scale methodology stripped the theory of its context #expands (0.80)
• F Scale scores strongly tracked anti-Semitism and ethnocentrism but less so political conservatism #expands (0.78)
• The F-scale was never independently validated without accompanying ethnocentrism items #qualifies (0.75) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1767