caa a22 4500 388078499 CHVBK 20180307125205.0 cr unu---uuuuu 161130e199909 xx s 000 0 eng 10.2307/2585580 doi S0003055400218248 pii (NATIONALLICENCE)cambridge-10.2307/2585580 Assessing the Validity of the Postmaterialism Index [Elektronische Daten] Inglehart's postmaterialism thesis describes an individual-level process of value change. Little attention has been devoted to validating the responses to his postmaterialist-materialist index. The aggregate-level distributions may appear to reflect a postmaterialist-materialist dimension, even if at the individual level responses on the questions making up the index are random. The logic of the survey questions used for the index defines a baseline against which the actual distribution of responses can be compared. Using such a standard, we find that individual responses are not constrained by an underlying value dimension, in the sense that the observed patterns of responses increasingly do not differ from what one would expect by chance. Furthermore, as one would expect for a random variable, index scores are virtually unexplainable as a dependent variable, and they cannot be used to predict support for various political and social issues, said to flow from attitudes measured by the index. Copyright © American Political Science Association 1999 Davis Darren W. Michigan State University Davenport Christian University of Maryland American Political Science Review Cambridge University Press 93/3(1999-09), 649-664 0003-0554 93:3<649 1999 93 PSR https://doi.org/10.2307/2585580 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research-article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.2307/2585580 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 700 1- Davis Darren W. Michigan State University NATIONALLICENCE 700 1- Davenport Christian University of Maryland NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- American Political Science Review Cambridge University Press 93/3(1999-09), 649-664 0003-0554 93:3<649 1999 93 PSR CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0 nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-cambridge