Reviving the Problem of Acquiescent Response Bias

Abstract

Summary Rorer's claim that meaningless acquiescence to attitude and personality scale items does not generalize and hence cannot be a souce of artifactual relationships is critically examined. Rorer excepts ambiguous scales from his own generalizations without providing or suggesting any test to tell which scales are ambiguous to a problematical degree; thus his generalizations are of unknown applicability. Three studies are reported in which balanced scales are scored for acquiescence only—i.e., scored without any reverse-scoring. Many high correlations between such scores were found—in direct contradiction of the findings used by Rorer. Correlations between acquiescence scores derived from balanced attitude scales and balanced personality scales were, however, generally low. It is concluded that meaningless acquiescence may be evinced by respondents to any scale if they find its items ambiguous and that such acquiescence will generalize from scale to scale. Meaningless acquiescence could then create many spurious relationships between unbalanced scales.