Scottish Social Attitudes Survey 2023 - Technical Report

Annex B – Construction of Left-Right Scale

Since 1999, SSAS has included two attitude scales which aim to measure where respondents stand on certain underlying value dimensions – left–right (used in this report) and libertarian–authoritarian.

A useful way of summarising the information from a number of questions of this sort is to construct an additive index^[xviii], ^[xix]. This approach rests on the assumption that there is an underlying – ‘latent’ – attitudinal dimension which characterises the answers to all the questions within each scale. If so, scores on the index are likely to be a more reliable indication of the underlying attitude than the answers to any one individual question.

The left-right scale consists of a number of statements to which the respondent is invited to “agree strongly”, “agree”, “neither agree nor disagree”, “disagree” or “disagree strongly”. The items are:

• Government should redistribute income from the better off to those who are less well off;
• Big business benefits owners at the expense of workers;
• Ordinary working people do not get their fair share of the nation’s wealth;
• There is one law for the rich and one for the poor
• Management will always try to get the better of employees if it gets the chance

The scale is formed by scoring the leftmost position as 1 and the rightmost position as 5. The “neither agree nor disagree” option is scored as 3. The scores to all the questions in the scale are added and then divided by the number of items in the scale, giving indices ranging from 1 (leftmost) to 5 (rightmost).