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39 Soc. F. 239 (1960-1961)
Anomie, Authoritarianism, Prejudice, and Socioeconomic Status: An Attempt at Clarification

handle is hein.journals/josf39 and id is 255 raw text is: ANOMIE, AUTHORITARIANISM, PREJUDICE persuading individual employers to change their policies or securing fair employment practice legislation. The latter has so far proved unfeasible even at the federal level. Similarly, inequality in the administration of justice is not a formal system sustained by local law, but is sustained by the actions of individual judges and policemen. Segregation in the schools and in other public facilities is, in contrast, a formal pattern sustained by state and local laws. These laws provide a concrete point of attack on the whole status sys- tem, and experience has proved that they can be attacked successfully. Hence as a matter of col- lective strategy, guided largely by the NAACP, energies are being concentrated on effecting a break-through in these fields. ANOMIE, AUTHORITARIANISM, PREJUDICE, AND SOCIO- ECONOMIC STATUS: AN ATTEMPT AT CLARIFICATION* EDWARD L. McDILL Vanderbilt University ABSTRACT In an attempt to clarify the relationship among anomie, authoritarianism, and prejudice a replication of the Srole and Rokeach-Roberts studies was conducted. Correlation analysis indicated the likelihood of a general factor accounting for the interrelationship among them. Factor analysis confirmed this hy- pothesis with one factor accounting for 45 percent of the total variance of items comprising the three scales. N 1951 Leo Srole presented before the meet- ings of the American Sociological Society the preliminary results of a study of the relation- ship among anomie, authoritarianism, and ethnic prejudice conducted in Springfield, Massachusetts.1 Following this preliminary study Srole in 1952 applied the concept of anomie to a study of mental health and certain corollaries in New York. He published these results in 1956 in a paper entitled Social Integration and Certain Corollaries: An Exploratory Study.'2 The results presented in that paper were drawn primarily from the Spring- field investigation; however, the paper also bene- fited from the results of the New York research. The hypothesis tested in the study was that anomie in individuals is associated with a rejective ori- entation toward outgroups in general and toward minority groups in particular.' * Paper read at the twenty-third annual meeting of the Southern Sociological Society in Atlanta, Georgia, April 8, 1960. 1 Leo Srole, Social Dysfunction, Personality, and Social Distance Attitudes (paper read before the Amer- ican Sociological Society, Chicago, 1951). 2 Leo Srole, Social Integration and Certain Corol- laries: An Exploratory Study, American Sociological Review, 21 (December 1956), pp. 709-16. 3 Ibid., p. 272. Srole postulated five theoretical components of anomie and devised a five-item scale to represent these components. He administered the anomie scale along with a condensed five-item version of the California F scale of authoritarianism and a measure of attitudes toward minority groups to a sample of 401 white, Christian, native-born adults.' Srole's chief findings are as follows: 1. Anomie and authoritarianism are both significantly related to prejudice in a positive direction; however, anomie is more strongly re- lated to prejudice than is authoritarianism. 2. When authoritarianism is held constant, the relationship between anomie and prejudice re- mains significantly high; however, when anomie is held constant, the statistically significant re- lationship between authoritarianism and prejudice disappears. 3. Social status, as measured by respondent's education combined with occupation of head of household, is only slightly related to prejudice, intermediately related to authoritarianism, and most highly related to anomie. Srole's measure of prejudice consisted of two kinds of data in combination: responses to five structured social distance items referring to Jews, Negroes, etc., and spontaneous comments revealing underlying atti- tudes toward minority groups.

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