The Dimensions of Social Change in the U.S.A. as Determined by P-Technique

Abstract

~HE present article is one of several' emanatj ing from the Laboratory of Group Behavior of the University of Illinois, and concerned with demonstrating the value of certain new techniques in analyzing sociological and anthropological data for the purposes of social psychological explanation. The chief novelty in these approaches has been a special use of factor analysis. Factor analysis, as is well known, was developed previously in psychology as the only objective method yet available for determining functional unities and independent dimensions in personality. Factor analysis is used here as a holistic method on the assumption that a social group with a single government and integrated economic and social activity, namely a national group, must be treated as an organic whole, and that the laws of social interaction will be more readily arrived at by this holistic treatment than by the intensive analysis of isolated economic or other manifestations of social life. It is thus a step toward the quantification of the relative potency of various influences or factors in complex historical or sociological happenings. The factor analytic method, as developed in psychology, begins with a population of organisms all of which are measured with respect to the same set of variables, chosen to have the maximum relevance to the life processes which are to be studied. The variables are then intercorrelated, so that if the experimenter begins with n variables, he ends with a matrix of correlations representing all the [ n(n)] possible relationships among the vari-