OBJECTIVE INDICATORS OF SUBJECTIVE CULTURE

Concern about the development, collection and validation of social indicators has been developing rapidly over the past few years. But this concern has been mainly with indicators of objective culture and with national rather than international indicators, leaving mostly lip-service t o be paid t o the nature and measurement of change in subjective culture. As far as the methodology of generating subjective social indicators is concerned, a t least three major orthogonal dichotomies can be distinguished. (1) Objective versus subjective: Although the intuitions of astute historians like Alexis de Tocqueville, trained cultural anthropologists, and sophisticated observers and reporters of the mass media are most useful for hypothesisforming, they are useless for hypothesis-testing and they obviously do not lend themselves t o correlational analyses with objective social indicators. Objective subjective indicators transform the mental states of members of a culture into quantitative forms capable of statistical manipulation. ( 2 ) Differential versus global: Whereas global subjective indicators reflect an overall estimation of some state of affairs (e.g., satisfaction with life) and may be objectively assessed Hadley Cantril’s self-anchoring “ladder” technique is an example differential subjective indicators apply a constant methodology across a sample of subjective states (e.g., attitudes toward diverse issues, meanings of diverse concepts), the sample being representative in terms of social concerns and investigator interests. (3) Systematic versus topical: Whereas in topicality a kind of “newsworthiness” criterion determines the questions asked and the concepts tapped (public opinion polling is a good example in the objective form), systematicity requires that one tap concepts that are reasonably stable over times and places (e.g., physical and mental health, interpersonal relations, attitudes toward work and play), even though feelings and beliefs about the things referred t o may be quite labile. In this paper I propose that the semantic differential technique, particularly in its cross-cultural applications, has potential as a means of providing objective indicators of subjective culture. Methodologically, it represents the “positive” poles of these three dichotomies: it yields objective, quantifiable data, it applies the same procedures differentially over indefinitely large samples of concepts, and it is clearly systematic rather than topical with respect t o times and places.