Validating the Willingness to Self-Censor Scale: Individual Differences in the Effect of the Climate of Opinion on Opinion Expression |
| |
| Authors: | Hayes Andrew F; Glynn Carroll J; Shanahan James |
| |
| Institution: | Andrew F. Hayes is an assistant professor in the School of Communication at The Ohio State University. His research interests are individual and situational predictors of self-censorship, public opinion perception, and statistical methodology. He is the author of Statistical Methods for Communication Science, published by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. |
| |
| Abstract: | Hayes, Glynn, and Shanahan (2005) defined self-censorship asthe withholding of one’s opinion around an audience perceivedto disagree with that opinion. They argued that people differin their willingness to self-censor and introduced an 8-itemself-report instrument, the Willingness to Self-Censor scale,to measure this individual difference. The results of an experimentalstudy presented here provide further evidence of the constructvalidity of the scale. Each participant in the study was presentedwith a hypothetical scenario that contained information suggestinga group of people the participant was conversing with abouta controversial topic held opinions that were either uniformlysimilar to or different from the participant’s own opinion.Four weeks prior, each participant had responded to the Willingnessto Self-Censor scale and a measure of dispositional shyness.As expected, the manipulation of the climate of opinion affectedwillingness to express an opinion to the group, but more soamong those who scored relatively high on the Willingness toSelf-Censor scale. These results support the notion that somepeople rely on information about the climate of opinion moreso than do others when they decide whether or not to voice theiropinion publicly, and they suggest that the Willingness to Self-Censorscale measures this individual difference. |
| |
| Keywords: | |
| 本文献已被 Oxford 等数据库收录！ |
|
