Short parenting survey - parents and non-parents please respond!

[JGP]

[brows raise]

[JonSnow4President]

Forcing me to choose, over the course of their lifetime, I'd go A's across.  But every single one is a false dichotomy.  You can be independent without being an ass to elders.  You can be self reliant and obedient.  You can be considerate and well behaved.  You can be curious and have good manners.  A child that is 100% A's and no B's is an insufferable little shit.  A child that is all B's and no A's will never succeed on his own in the real world.  

 

[Mexal]

13 minutes ago, JonSnow4President said:

Forcing me to choose, over the course of their lifetime, I'd go A's across.  But every single one is a false dichotomy.  You can be independent without being an ass to elders.  You can be self reliant and obedient.  You can be considerate and well behaved.  You can be curious and have good manners.  A child that is 100% A's and no B's is an insufferable little shit.  A child that is all B's and no A's will never succeed on his own in the real world.  

 

Yes, but the question seems to be about which attribute you most value. You can be obedient and self reliant but people will want to raise their kids more to obey their parents or to be self reliant first and foremost, question but still obey with less importance. Do you want your kid to be independent or have respect for their elders first? Is it the respect given because they're elders or is it given because they deserve it? You can be considerate and well behaved, but do you want your kids to be considerate leading to well behaved or do you just want them to be well behaved first and foremost which leads to consideration? These are different ways of thinking about things. It doesn't necessarily mean one is more right than the other, just that people value these things differently which changes how they raise their kids. 

Personally, I'm A, A, A, A though the last one is toughest for me.

[Gears of the Beast]

So I can't help but notice that I've seen these questions before, in this Vox piece to be precise. These questions don't really have anything to do with a parenting survey they're supposedly designed to reveal authoritarian tendencies. 

 

Quote

 Feldman developed what has since become widely accepted as the definitive measurement of authoritarianism: four simple questions that appear to ask about parenting but are in fact designed to reveal how highly the respondent values hierarchy, order, and conformity over other values.

Please tell me which one you think is more important for a child to have: independence or respect for elders?
Please tell me which one you think is more important for a child to have: obedience or self-reliance?
Please tell me which one you think is more important for a child to have: to be considerate or to be well-behaved?
Please tell me which one you think is more important for a child to have: curiosity or good manners?

 

 

Vox claims that it is 'widely accepted as the definitive measurement of authoritarianism' which I find pretty hard to believe but I haven't bothered looking into it (and they didn't bother providing any footnotes). I just can't imagine why vague questions about parenting specifically would be able to give you a good idea of how that person thinks about things on a societal level. 

[AverageGuy]

CCCC

[Ormond]

37 minutes ago, Gears of the Beast said:

So I can't help but notice that I've seen these questions before, in this Vox piece to be precise. These questions don't really have anything to do with a parenting survey they're supposedly designed to reveal authoritarian tendencies. 

 

 

Vox claims that it is 'widely accepted as the definitive measurement of authoritarianism' which I find pretty hard to believe but I haven't bothered looking into it (and they didn't bother providing any footnotes). I just can't imagine why vague questions about parenting specifically would be able to give you a good idea of how that person thinks about things on a societal level. 

As a personality psychologist I certainly disagree with that statement. However, it is true that scores on these child rearing questions are highly correlated with more complete measures of authoritarianism, and if you want a measure of that which is both short and not obvious enough so that people can easily modify their answers to try to fool you, it's probably a fairly good alternative. 

Altemeyer's scale is a longer test of authoritarianism which is often used these days:

http://personality-testing.info/tests/RWAS/

 

[Starkess]

Non-parent here, answering before checking any other responses.

A,A,B,A

[Gears of the Beast]

1 hour ago, Ormond said:

As a personality psychologist I certainly disagree with that statement. However, it is true that scores on these child rearing questions are highly correlated with more complete measures of authoritarianism, and if you want a measure of that which is both short and not obvious enough so that people can easily modify their answers to try to fool you, it's probably a fairly good alternative. 

I'd like to see some evidence demonstrating the reliability of these parenting questions for the purpose of identifying authoritarians because that Vox article makes some pretty big claims without supplying any evidence at all. I did find this one relevant footnote in the piece which states:

"Vox's data analysis only reflects white voters, because the validity of the parenting questions as a measurement of authoritarianism is less clear for nonwhite respondents. However, because Republican primary voters already skew heavily white, limiting our sample in this way is unlikely to reduce the data's validity for the GOP primary race."

Which is kinda weird...if you go to that link it's a study that used this exact parenting scale to compare blacks and whites and found that blacks scored significantly higher on all of the supposedly authoritarian answers except for respect for elders where blacks only scored ~5% higher. The study states: "First, the child rearing scale should display a lack of measurement invariance, since we expect Blacks to construe the items differently than Whites. Second, the child rearing scale should perform as expected among Whites, but not Blacks, since we believe only the former group understands the scale items in the way that they were originally designed." That sounds pretty weird to me, I don't see why "blacks" in general would construe these very basic questions that much differently to whites in general. It seems that Vox has decided this scale can't be reliably used to predict authoritarianism among black people but can still be touted as "the definitive measurement of authoritarianism (except only on white people, for some reason)". 

[Ormond]

I very much doubt if Vox "decided this" -- the writer of the article is almost surely passing along the rationale of the political scientists whose work she is quoting and summarizing. You would need to go back to the original research articles to get more details about the measurement issues. 

I would guess, though, that African-American culture's emphasis on "respect" combined with the day to day experiences of African-Americans in this country mean that choosing all "B" answers is not correlated with rejection of out-groups in the same way for them that it is for Whites. For example, It's hard to see even African-Americans who like the B options on the child-rearing scale agreeing with the last question on the Altemeyer scale:

This country would work a lot better if certain groups of troublemakers would just shut up and accept their group's traditional place in society.

 

[Mexal]

9 hours ago, Gears of the Beast said:

So I can't help but notice that I've seen these questions before, in this Vox piece to be precise. These questions don't really have anything to do with a parenting survey they're supposedly designed to reveal authoritarian tendencies. 

Vox claims that it is 'widely accepted as the definitive measurement of authoritarianism' which I find pretty hard to believe but I haven't bothered looking into it (and they didn't bother providing any footnotes). I just can't imagine why vague questions about parenting specifically would be able to give you a good idea of how that person thinks about things on a societal level. 

I take it you didn't actually read the first post all that closely?

[Greywolf2375]

 

4 year old son:

A,B,A,A

[DanteGabriel]

29 minutes ago, Ormond said:

I very much doubt if Vox "decided this" -- the writer of the article is almost surely passing along the rationale of the political scientists whose work she is quoting and summarizing. You would need to go back to the original research articles to get more details about the measurement issues. 

I would guess, though, that African-American culture's emphasis on "respect" combined with the day to day experiences of African-Americans in this country mean that choosing all "B" answers is not correlated with rejection of out-groups in the same way for them that it is for Whites. For example, It's hard to see even African-Americans who like the B options on the child-rearing scale agreeing with the last question on the Altemeyer scale:

This country would work a lot better if certain groups of troublemakers would just shut up and accept their group's traditional place in society.

 

I imagine the increased desire for the authoritarian-leaning answers among black people probably has something to do with "the Talk" -- telling their kids, especially their sons, not to be rude or disrespectful around authority, especially police, because it could get them arrested, beaten, or shot.

[sologdin]

more than that, you are furthermore unlikely to have what adorno designated as an 'authoritarian personality.'  

[Ser Arthur Hightower]

A^4

I get that with very young children B answers may be a necessity for certain things, but in general we should all strive to be A parents.

Saying this as a non-parent of course.

[Isis]

I see around me all the time kids showing a total lack of manners and their parents not only doing nothing to correct them, but not even noticing/realising that their kids are displaying poor manners. 

While curiosity will often be a good thing, good manners will always be a good thing. And curiosity can usually wait until an appropriate moment. 

So obviously the answer is A, A, A, B.

 

 

[MerenthaClone]

A, A, A, A.

Not a parent, if that changes anything.  

[JGP]

No prize, he was just fishing Mandy. Please, control your impulses. 

[Masonity]

As a parent; AAAA(h! Real Monsters!)

[ummester]

2 teenage boys. They were brought up on the side of the As and now I wish it was more the Bs 

The choices in this topic are loaded, as someone mentioned earlier, it's not an either/or thing.

[Kalbear]

Ok, Kalbear, we did our part, now where's our prize?

Sadly the data is basically useless for what I was doing, thanks largely to the corruption of the responses.

What I did find goes with something Ormond noted which is that the answers are much more correlated with culture and upbringing. For most of my south Asian coworkers, b was a much more common answer. For the Russians and eastern Europeans b was even more common.