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The Usability of the Concept of “Prejudice”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2025

Henry S. Dyer
Henry S. Dyer*
Affiliation:
Harvard University
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Abstract

For the purpose of determining whether the trait concept of “prejudice” is usable in the communication of meaning, representative samples of the responses of 101 ninth-grade children were submitted to a diverse group of 20 judges who were requested to rank 11 series of the responses in accordance with the amount of prejudice they were judged to exhibit. The usability, or use-value, of the concept is conceived as the extent to which the judges can agree in their ratings and is expressed in terms of the average intercorrelation of such ratings. It is shown that a null hypothesis of no use-value (\documentclass[12pt]{minimal}\usepackage{amsmath}\usepackage{wasysym}\usepackage{amsfonts}\usepackage{amssymb}\usepackage{amsbsy}\usepackage{mathrsfs}\usepackage{upgreek}\setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt}\begin{document}$$\tilde \gamma= 0$$\end{document}) is untenable. The data further suggest that the concept of “prejudice” tends to have its highest use-value in situations where the factor of prejudice is commonly considered to be a matter of serious social concern.

Type
Original Paper
Information
Psychometrika , Volume 10 , Issue 3 , September 1945 , pp. 219 - 224
Copyright
Copyright © 1945 Psychometric Society

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References

* The nature of certain questions and responces “dates” the study. All data were gathered in the early spring of 1940.

† “Average rank” is the mean of the ranks assigned by all twenty judges. A response ranked “1” would be judged most prejudiced; a rosponse ranked “20” would be judged least prejulced.

* For a complete presentation of the data used in this study and the methods by which they were gathered see Dyer, H. S., Observable evidence of prejudice in ninth grade children, an unpublished dissertation on file at the Harvard University Library, Cambridge Mass., 1941.

* Kelley, T. L. Statistical method. New York: MacMillan, 1924, pp. 217-221.

* A more nearly exact test of significance would be obtained by transforming the individual r’s to Fisher’s z, averaging the z values to secure z, and then computing σ-. Since the individual r’s were not readily available, this method was not feasible. However, it seems reasonable to assume that the present method is not so faulty as to invalidate the inference. (See Fisher, R. A. Statistical methods for research workers. London, 1938, pp. 202-9.15.)