MORE ON THE WINGNUT MIND

I noted below that a wingnut poster on AOL disputed the results of this study. Here is his reply in full:

Re: The Nothing Party
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#21 - Posted on 8/16/08 at 05:10 PM
Re: Post #19

O3RON1
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If you're gonna start out lying, this isn't going far. Since you're being dishonest, I'll give you the redacted version.

In order to understand the results of any study you must know three things. The definition of hypothesis, theory, and fact. I'll use the Webster definitions;

HYPOTHESIS , THEORY , LAW mean a formula derived by inference from scientific data that explains a principle operating in nature.

HYPOTHESIS implies insufficient evidence to provide more than a tentative explanation

THEORY implies a greater range of evidence and greater likelihood of truth

LAW implies a statement of order and relation in nature that has been found to be invariable under the same conditions .The little study you are trumpeting from 1969 was conducted using a very, very small sample. The researchers ask the teachers, (unqualified to make the determination, resulting in an opinion), to rate childrens temperments.

Twenty years later they followed up by comparing that temperment (remember a teacher unqualified to make a psychological determination resulting in that teachers opinion) to that child's political preference.

The researchers reached a "hypothesis" as to how the temperments matched up with the political preferences. The whole exercise was a waste of time since it proved exactly nothing. Using and opinion to reach a conclusion that is little more than another opinion is profoundly flawed. A real research scientist would laugh those two people out of town.

The Coup de Gras is that LOLO even admitted the following: "Please remember that this doesn't describe every child who goes on to become a conservative or a liberal. I have liberal and conservative adult friends who don't fit these descriptions as children. I'm just relaying what the study found." An open admission that the study debunked itself and the studys match up of temperment and political preference doesn't even pass an empirical test from a liberal blogger.




SFE>>>
SFE

First, the evaluations done when they were young children were empirically valid. The original paper offers this description:

2.3. Evaluating personality during the nursery school years, two decades earlier

During their nursery school years in the longitudinal study, the age 23 participants had been closely evaluated. Each child at age three was assessed by three experienced, independently functioning nursery school teachers each of whom had seen the child daily for seven months before offering their separate, well-versed evaluations. At age 4, and when in a second nursery school for seven months, each child was independently assessed again by an entirely different set of three experienced nursery school teachers functioning independently.
The nursery school teachers had been selected by the nursery school head and
tended to be graduate students from the University of California School of Education. The nursery school context was socializing-emphasizing and somewhat permissive, not unusual then.
Evaluations of each child were encoded by means of the California Child Q-set (CCQ) (Block & Block, 1980a), a carefully evolved, widely ranging set of statements
describing a child’s personality-cognitive-social characteristics. It requires knowledgeable assessors to each provide comprehensive character descriptions of a child in a conceptually systematic, quantifable, and commensurate form. Beyond provision of the100 CCQ-items and technical instruction as to how to employ the CCQ-set, there were no further instructions regarding the cast of the required personality formulations. Inother research contexts, CCQ personality descriptions have proven empirically generative in many ways, relating in numerous and implicative ways to later and other criteria (cf., e.g., Block, Block, & Harrington, 1974; Block, Block, & Keyes, 1988; Block & Gjerde, 1986; Block, Gjerde, & Block, 1991; Block & Block, 1980b; Block, Block, & Morrison, 1981; Buss, Block, & Block, 1980). For a general treatment of the rationale and methodology of this assessment procedure, consult Block (1961).

Each assessor independently evaluated the salience for a child of each of the 100 CCQ set items or variables by placing them into a fixed, quasi-normal distribution using nine categories—from not at all characteristic or negatively salient to highly characteristic or positively salient of the child being described. The three independent CCQ assessments of a child at age 3 were averaged, as were the three CCQ assessments of each child at age 4.
For each child, the two averaged CCQ composites were, in turn, pooled to establish even more stable CCQ characterizations. On psychometric grounds, these pooled evaluations may be presumed to have a greater nomothetic validity than the validity of any of the separately offered Q-sorts. It is the pooled Q-sort descriptions that were used in the present analyses. Obviously, these earlier nursery school evaluations, stored for 20 years, were independent of the later-achieved LIB/CON scores.

Second, LOLO is not an author of the study nor a psychologist. She's a blogger who made a post about research into personality and politics. After giving a summary of some of the research, she concludes:

I believe these studies and trust the researchers. Psychologist, researchers, college professors, don't tend to make up complete BS. They are pretty scientific .

This is hardly the "coup de grace" that O3RON1 claimed.