Search results

We live in a world in which we are socially, politically, economically, and environmentally connected with other people. Online communication has facilitated people coming together from different parts of the world. In terms of social justice movements, people have come together to share ideas about how they perceive social inequality and how to address it, which is what academics call critical consciousness. While scholars have explored critical consciousness in the American context, whether it operates on a global scale is under-explored. To address this question, we administered the Critical Consciousness Scale (a validated survey) with students from the United States, Iran, and Ukraine. Our findings demonstrate that critical consciousness maintains its factor structure across the entire sample, meaning that students from these three countries share some notions of critical consciousness. However, when comparing national groups, we find that critical consciousness is defined differently by students in different countries. In a practical sense, these findings mean that some aspects of critical consciousness are shared, but there are important differences in how it is perceived and how its components relate to one another. By attempting to understand critical consciousness internationally, this study serves as a cautionary narrative for international solidarity movements organized around the goal of social justice.

A number of researchers have argued that ranking techniques are more appropriate than rating methods for the measurement of values in surveys. The form-resistant correlation hypothesis proposes that observed associations among values & between values & other variables should remain invariant across measurement methods. However, recent research on parental values for child qualities suggests that ratings & rankings produce different correlational results. Here, data from a sample of 466 US adults, collected as part of the 1980 General Social Survey, are used to test the hypothesis that discrepancies between rating & ranking results are due to the fact that, when responding to rating questions, some respondents avoid making difficult choices between valued qualities by rating all the qualities as highly & equally desirable. Consistent with this hypothesis, when nondifferentiating respondents are removed from the analyzed sample, the substantive results of analyses of rating data resemble the results typically obtained using ranking data, which suggests that ranking may be the superior method of measuring values. 3 Tables, 28 References. AA

Several repeated cross-national surveys include measurements of attitudes toward gender roles to investigate individuals' beliefs regarding the appropriateness of men and women's roles in a particular context. When used to compare attitudes across countries, these measurements reveal critical factors that could cause a lack of equivalence between different cultural contexts, and that could therefore produce misleading results. Nevertheless, the use of such measures to compare country means without assessing measurement equivalence is common. It should also be considered that the assessment of equivalence within a large-scale sample from cross-sectional surveys through multigroup confirmatory factor analysis (MGCFA) often fails because of the strict requirements necessary. The current article is used to assess the measurement equivalence of the gender role attitudes scale included in the last wave of the World Values Survey in 59 countries, with the main goal of identifying the most invariant model for the largest number of groups. The study involved comparing two methods belonging to the frequentist approach: MGCFA and the frequentist alignment procedure, a highly novel and promising method that is still rarely used. Using the first technique, partial scalar invariance was achieved for 27 countries. By employing the frequentist alignment optimization, an acceptable degree of noninvariance was achieved for 35 countries. Thus, the study confirmed the frequentist alignment procedure as a viable alternative to the MGCFA.