Abstract
Q methodology is employed for purposes of providing an instrumental base to Lasswell's concept of the continuing decision seminar. Policy-making is regarded as essentially subjective and value-laden in nature, hence the use of instruments to assist in the micromodeling of complex decision processes—as embodied in decision seminars—must give centrality to human judgment. The factor-analytic procedures proposed are applied first to a life-history seminar. Suggestions are then made for the extension of these methods to future seminars, decision-making, and to the policy sciences more generally.
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Lasswell, H. D., The Future of Political Science (London: Tavistock Publications, 1964), pp. 123–146.
In actuality, many of the principles to be outlined were adopted once the sessions began. The seminar lasted only four weeks, governed by the educationally oblivious restrictions of a university summer-quarter system.
Lasswell, op. cit. The Future of Political Science (London: Tavistock Publications, 1964), pp. 125–140, and “The Continuing Decision Seminar as a Technique of Instruction,” Policy Sciences, 2 (March 1971), 43–57; A Pre-View of Policy Sciences (New York: American Elsevier, 1971), pp. 142–157; “Technique of Decision Seminars,” Midwest Journal of Political Science, 4 (August, 1960), 213–236; “Decision Seminars: The Contextual Use of Audiovisual Means in Teaching, Research, and Consultation,” in R. L. Merritt, and S. Rokkan (eds.), Comparing Nations: The Use of Quantitative Data in Cross-National Research (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univer. Press, 1966), pp. 499–524; “The Significance of Vicos for the Emerging Policy Sciences,” in H. F. Dobyns, P. L. Doughty, and H. D. Lasswell (eds.), Peasants, Power, and Applied Social Change (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1971), pp. 179–193; “The Policy Sciences,” in D. L. Sills (ed.), International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 12 (New York: Macmillan, 1968), 181–189. See also Kemp, D., and Little, G., “An Interview with H. D. Lasswell,” Melbourne Journal of Politics, 4 (1971), 41–54.
See Davies, A. F., “Criteria for the Political Life History,” Historical Studies (Australia and New Zealand), 13 (October 1967), 76–85.
An over-all consideration of the problem of perspective is in Brown, S. R., and Taylor, R. W., “Frames of Reference and the Observation of Behavior,” Social Science Quarterly, in press. Of the various means for weakening bias, Lasswell (A Pre-View of Policy Sciences, p. 148) suggests critical examination of presentations and the short-term introduction into the seminar of expert witnesses. To these could be added the method, to be illustrated here, of the randomization of the effects of perspective, a procedure introduced into modern experimentation by Fisher, R. A., The Design of Experiments (7th ed. ; New York: Hafner, 1960). An attempt to come to grips with such difficulties, and one related to our procedures, is described in Beck, S. J., “Differential Judgments by Social Workers: A Q-Technique Research in Families of Schizophrenic Children,” in S. R. Brown and D. J. Brenner (eds.), Science, Psychology, and Communication (New York: Teachers College Press, 1972), pp. 121–140.
Erikson, E. H., Childhood and Society (New York: Norton, 1950); Lasswell, H. D., “Democratic Character,” in The Political Writings of Harold D. Lasswell (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1951), pp. 463–525; Pye, L. W., “Personal Identity and Political Ideology,” Behavioral Science, 6 (July 1961), 205–221.
The complete sample of statements (and their factor scores, to be discussed subsequently) is available on request. On Q-technique and its methodology, see Stephenson, W., The Study of Behavior (Chicago: Univer. of Chicago Press, 1953). A useful summary is in Kerlinger, F. N., “Q Methodology in Behavioral Research,” in Brown and Brenner, Science, Psychology, and Communication, pp. 3–38.
See Triandis, H. C., The Analysis of Subjective Culture (New York: Wiley Interscience, 1972), and Pye, L. W., “Culture and Political Science: Problems in the Evaluation of the Concept of Political Culture,” Social Science Quarterly, 53 (September 1972), 285–296.
This is in keeping with the principle of “limited independent variety,” as expressed by Keynes, J. M., A Treatise on Probability (London: Macmillan, 1921), pp. 249, 258. This is fundamental to factor-analytic metatheory, as described by Burt, C., The Factors of the Mind (London: Univer. of London Press, 1940), p. 222 ff.
Lasswell, H. D., “The Method of Interlapping Observation in the Study of Personality in Culture,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 32 (July–September 1937), 240–243.
Suffice it to say that important differences were found among factor A, B, and AB respondents based on their life history interviews and the results of objective and projective tests: supportive but demanding interpersonal relations in the early histories of the factor A respondents resulted in an internalization of authority, and this inner-directed “superego glow”—different in quality from that in factor B—appeared to serve as a guide to political action. Respondents in the AB interlap were experiencing conflict, caught between fairly supportive family histories (factor A) incompatible with the more rebellious mores of the youth culture (factor B) in which they were at the time situated.
See Merton, R. K., “Insiders and Outsiders: A Chapter in the Sociology of Knowledge,” in Merton et al., Varieties of Political Expression in Sociology (Chicago: Univer. of Chicago Press, 1972), pp. 9–47.
Rosenblueth, A., and Wiener, N., “The Role of Models in Science,” Philosophy of Science, 12 (October 1945), 316–321.
See Kline, F. M., “Dynamics of a Leaderless Group,” International Journal of Group Psychotherapy, 22 (April 1972), 234–242. On the overlooked importance of extrarational forces in group decision-making, see Dror, Y., Public Policymaking Reexamined (Scranton, Penn.: Chandler, 1968), pp. 149–153; Janis I. L., Victims of Groupthink (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972) ; and Rice, A. K., “Individual, Group and Intergroup Processes,” Human Relations, 22 (December 1969), 565–584. All but one member of this seminar had been exposed to group relations training (Tavistock method), and prior skill acquisition of this kind is of importance.
Lasswell, A Pre-View of Policy Sciences, pp. 154–155.
Vickers, Sir Geoffrey, “Commonly Ignored Elements in Policymaking,” Policy Sciences, 3 (July 1972), 266.
Stephenson, W., “Applications of Communication Theory: III. Intelligence and Multivalued Choice,” Psychological Record, 23 (Winter 1973), 17–32.
Shahan, C., “Perspective of Firearms Legislation—History, Influence, Opinion,” unpublished paper, Kent State University, Kent, Ohio, 1969.
Lasswell, H. D., “Decision Seminars: The Contextual Use of Audiovisual Means in Teaching, Research, and Consultation.” For example, the passage of regulations favorable to dignity may enable those with congruent values to retain better contact with their past constructs of the future; those with noncongruent value systems may systematically forget their past constructs (which would be reflected in low present-past Q-sort correlations) and project their hostilities into the future (which would result in low presentfuture correlations, but high past-future correlations). The influence of judgment stability could also be analyzed in terms of individual reliability coefficients, i.e., the correlation of an individual's Q sort at time-1 with the same individual's Q sort (under stable conditions) at time-2. On judgmental stability, see Lasswell, “The Continuing Decision Seminar as a Technique of Instruction,” p. 54, and Brown, “Consistency and the Persistence of Ideology : Some Experimental Results,” Public Opinion Quarterly, 34 (Spring 1970), 60–68.
Lasswell, “The Continuing Decision Seminar as a Technique of Instruction,” p. 44.
It is to be emphasized that individuals with high self-conscience and low self-reality correlations are governed in their policy thinking by strong superego considerations, and that seminars with superego-predominant and ego-predominant individuals could be composed for comparative purposes. It is to be pointed out further that whereas individual Q sorts can be “rationalized,” i.e., respondents are quite capable of giving reasons why they rank some items higher than others, the resulting factor structure itself seems to be largely outside individual awareness. See Baas, L. R., and Brown, S. R., “Generating Rules for Intensive Analysis: The Study of Transformations,” Psychiatry, 36 (May 1973), 172–183.
Lasswell, “Technique of Decision Seminars,” p. 236.
See Hudson, L., The Cult of the Fact (London: Jonathan Cape, 1972), and Stephenson, W., “Applications of Communication Theory: I. The Substructure of Science,” Psychological Record, 22 (Winter 1972), 17–36. An earlier statement on this issue is by Köhler, W., The Place of Value in a World of Facts (New York: Liveright, 1938).
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Brown, S.R. The composition of microcosms. Policy Sci 5, 15–27 (1974). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00155714
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00155714