Symbolic racism measurement is internally coherent and unified.

Evidence

To sum up, symbolic racism seems to be a quite coherent and unified belief system underlying the white public’s attitudes toward racial politics. A priorí structural equation models of symbolic racism found that a model of symbolic racism as a unified whole fits better than two alternatives, that its four constituent themes are distinct or that it breaks into dominant ideology and political resentment factors. A two-factor attributional model (individual vs. structural attributions for blacks’ disadvantage) proved to be the best fitting, however, in both confirmatory and exploratory factor analyses. But the difference between these two factors is so slight that they seem best interpreted as two quite similar variants of the same underlying psychological construct: (1) they are highly correlated with each other and with the second-order factor of global symbolic racism; (2) they have almost completely overlapping effects on racial policy preferences across all policy domains; and (3) they correlate similarly with other attitudes (differing mainly in that the individual variant has somewhat stronger links to traditional racial prejudice), suggesting that they have similar social and psychological origins. — Christopher Tarman and David O. Sears, The Conceptualization and Measurement…, 123

Categorization

• XREF: Directly bears on the reader’s symbolic-racism measurement critique: individual-vs-structural attributional variants correlate highly and show overlapping policy effects, informing whether threat perception is being validly distinguished from the political attitudes it explains. — connects to: Symbolic racism has survived empirical tests of its critiques — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 2177; Symbolic racism comprises four coherent belief themes — John F. Dovidio, Peter Glick, Laurie A. Rudman, On the Nature of Prejudice: Fifty Years…, 2178; Symbolic racism’s discriminant validity from allied constructs is empirically testable — Christopher Tarman and David O. Sears, The Conceptualization and Measurement…, 147

Related

• Symbolic racism may decompose into separate attitude factors rather than one coherent belief system (similarity 0.92)
• Symbolic racism’s discriminant validity from allied constructs is empirically testable (similarity 0.90)
• Controversy over symbolic racism measures is empirically moot since all variants predict equally. (similarity 0.90)
• Symbolic racism scales measure a distinct attitude rather than mere conservatism (similarity 0.89)
• Symbolic racism scales measure a construct distinct from the policy preferences they predict. (similarity 0.88)
• Symbolic racism is empirically distinct from old-fashioned racism. (similarity 0.87)
• Early and recent symbolic racism studies both measured the same four themes (similarity 0.87)
• Symbolic racism differs from traditional prejudice only in measurement, not theory (similarity 0.86)
• Symbolic racism has survived empirical tests of its critiques (similarity 0.86)
• Distinct consequences indicate whether symbolic-racism variants are truly separate constructs. (similarity 0.86)
• Symbolic racism explains racial policy preferences independent of conservatism. (similarity 0.86)
• Symbolic racism is not reducible to political conservatism (similarity 0.86)
• Symbolic racism loads on a statistically distinct factor from older racism forms (similarity 0.86)
• Different racism constructs predict political outcomes unequally (similarity 0.85)
• Individual and structural symbolic racism share a single underlying attitudinal structure (similarity 0.85)

Broader Connections

• Symbolic racism has survived empirical tests of its critiques #corroborates (0.85) — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 2177
• Symbolic racism comprises four coherent belief themes #expands (0.80) — John F. Dovidio, Peter Glick, Laurie A. Rudman, On the Nature of Prejudice, 2178
• Symbolic racism’s discriminant validity from allied constructs is empirically testable #expands (0.75) — Christopher Tarman and David O. Sears, The Conceptualization and Measurement…, 147