Right-Wing Authoritarianism, Social Dominance Orientation and Personality

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Table of Contents

Introduction
Results and discussion
Overall summary and conclusion
References

Introduction

In the research article, Right-Wing Authoritarianism, Social Dominance Orientation and Personality: An Analysis Using the IPIP Measure, Heaven & Bucci (2001) examine and investigate the extent to which both right-winged authoritarianism (RWA) and Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) are linked to the five major personality dimensions. They affirm that although both RWA and SDO do predict racial and intergroup prejudice, previous research has suggested that RWA and SDO have distinct psychological features.

The authors propose three hypotheses: first, men will score significantly higher than women will on SDO; secondly, RWA will be significantly positively associated with Conscientiousness and Extraversion and significantly negatively associated with Openness to Experience; and thirdly, SDO will be significantly negatively associated with agreeableness.

To test these hypotheses, they ask subjects to complete four self-report inventories; the international Personality Item Pool, Right-wing authoritarianism, Social dominance orientation and the social desirability response set. Five subjects give a result beyond the required limit when tested under the social desirability response set, prompting the researcher to exclude them from his study sample.

Introduction, Aims and Hypotheses

The beginning of this paper, including the introduction, aims, and hypotheses, seems to lack of clear flowing ideas. This is because the researchers have digressed a bit by concentrating on explaining what prejudice is and how to avoid it, and as a result looses grip on the prejudice theme.

For example, the paper starts by presenting the rational for the study, looking at things like in group and out-group prejudices. The authors suggest that there are two predictors however, they drop that, and it suddenly becomes about comparing the two constructs.

Method section, scales

In this section, there is a possibility that the sample is not representative of the whole university population. This is what the writer says under the methods section. This statement, if true, would mean that the study findings would not fully represent the population under study. This would undermine the purpose of the study and the researchers should have used a sample size that could give them the confidence of full population representation.

The adjustment of the sample size also evokes a question: Why reduce the sample size. The reason for reducing number of respondents from 220 to fifteen is unjustifiable since if their response in the social desirability response set was beyond the scale, it is possible that they would give significant response in the other areas of interest if the researcher retained them. The other justifiable option would also have been the replacement of these five with other participants so that the researchers do not affect the sample size.

Results and discussion

Even though the researchers have represented the results in a simple and easy to understand manner, the analysis part of these results is not clear. The researchers do not show the formulae they used in determining quantities such as mean, standard deviation, and value of eta squared. They should have shown how they obtained these values to make interpretation easier. In addition, the results are not fully consistent to the first hypothesis.

This hypothesis states that men will score significantly higher than women will do on Social Dominance Orientation (SDO). From table two, the mean and standard deviations for male participants are 32.27 and 11.83 while those of their female counterparts are 28.21 and 9.39 respectively. From these values, it is vivid that the men scores are just slightly higher than those of the females are. Thus, hypothesis is not consistent with the results.

The IPIP inventory does not directly show how to measure five personality domains, named as Agreeableness, Neuroticism, Extraversion, Conscientiousness, and Openness to Experience as the researchers say it should under materials. This is because these traits appear nowhere on the table.

Under discussion, the researchers only analyze Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Openness to Experience, leaving out Neuroticism and Extraversion. This clearly indicates that the analysis of results in this research is shallow. To avoid this, the researcher should have discussed all the domains and relate them well with the IPIP inventory.

Overall summary and conclusion

The analysis of the research article, Right-Wing Authoritarianism, Social Dominance Orientation, and Personality: An Analysis Using the IPIP Measure by Heaven and Bucci in 2001 has good organization from the start since the researchers have mentioned well the hypotheses and described the study method.

They have also well represented the results in tables. Despite that, the article seems to have many shortcomings. First, the sample is too small and worse still, the researchers reduced it during the study, and they are not sure whether it is fully representative. The table that represents IPIP inventory does not clearly represent the five personality domains, as it should have.

The analysis of the results also is rather shallow because the researchers do not exhaust all the domains he should have as shown in the IPIP inventory. According to Agnihotri (2001), a good research paper should be clearly written to achieve its objectives without obvious discrepancies (p.29). Therefore, like many similar articles elsewhere, this research article can be an excellent source of information, only if the researchers address the weak areas as this critique points out.

References

Agnihotri, A. Writing a Good Research Paper. Journal of Medical Update, 16, 10-34.

Heaven, P., & Bucci, S. (2001). Right-Wing Authoritarianism, Social Dominance Orientation and Personality: An Analysis Using the IPIP Measure. European Journal of Personality, 15, 49-56

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