The F Scale’s nine sub-constructs lack independent psychological reality

Evidence

The items as a whole had something in common. The scores on each single item were correlated with total scores for the remaining items and the mean of these correlations was .33. At a later date the authors of the F Scale made their original data available to Melvin (1955) who did a factor analysis of it and found a very strong general factor running through all items (cited by Eysenck, 1954, p. 152). The Berkeley authors had found a superficially heterogeneous set of opinions that had, as a total set, some kind of psychological unity. However the items within a subscale were not more closely correlated with one another than they were with numerous items outside the subscale. The nine symptoms or characteristics (e.g., “conventionalism,” “projectivity”) were not, in short, shown to be psychologically real. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 493

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to how constructed scales can have high internal consistency yet no meaningful sub-factor structure - a lesson for anyone building composite measures.
• QUESTION: Does this foreshadow the later anti-Semitism-as-right-wing-authoritarianism measurement debates, i.e., whether RWA collapsed into a single factor?