Free association, not positivist procedure, generated F-scale questionnaire items

Evidence

In Berkeley, we then developed the F-scale with a freedom which differed considerably from the idea of a pedantic science which has to justify each of its steps. The reason for this was probably what, over there, might have been termed the psychoanalytic background' of the four of us who were leading the project, particularly our familiarity with the method of free association. I emphasize this because a work like the Authoritarian Personality [the book in which the Berkeley group later published its findings], which has been accused of many things, but whose familiarity with American materials and American procedures has never been denied, was produced in a manner which does not correspond at all to the usual image of positivism in social science . . . We spent hours waiting for ideas to occur to us, not just for entire dimensions, variables’ and syndromes, but also for individual items for the questionnaire. The less their relation to the main topic was visible, the prouder we were of them, while we expected for theoretical reasons to find correlations between ethnocentrism, anti-Semitism and reactionary views in the political and economic sphere. We then checked these items in constant `pre-tests’, using these both to restrict the questionnaire to a reasonable size, which was technically necessary, and to exclude those items which proved not to be sufficiently selective. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1583

Categorization

• XREF: Challenges the standard image of The Authoritarian Personality as rigorous positivist sociology; connects to ch28’s dialectics critique of positivism.
• SEED: An essay angle: how the Frankfurt School smuggled psychoanalytic method inside the ‘objective’ F-scale, blending intuition with pre-testing.