International Journal of Public Opinion Research Advance Access originally published online on March 18, 2005
International Journal of Public Opinion Research 2005 17(4):443-455; doi:10.1093/ijpor/edh072
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Validating the Willingness to Self-Censor Scale: Individual Differences in the Effect of the Climate of Opinion on Opinion Expression
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.
Carroll J. Glynn is a professor and the Director of the School of Communication at The Ohio State University. Her research interests are in public opinion formation and change and the relationship of social norms to public opinion expression. She is coauthor of Public Opinion, published by Westview Press.
James Shanahan is an associate/international professor of communication at Cornell University. His research interests include environmental communication, media effects, and public opinion. He has authored and edited several books, including Propaganda without propagandists? (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2001), Television and its Viewers: Cultivation Theory and Research (Cambridge University Press), Nature Stories: Depictions of the Environment and their Effects and Democracy Tango (both by Hampton Press).
Address correspondence to Andrew F. Hayes, School of Communication, The Ohio State University, 3016 Derby Hall, Columbus, OH 43210, USA, E-mail: hayes.338{at}osu.edu
Hayes, Glynn, and Shanahan (2005) defined self-censorship as the withholding of one’s opinion around an audience perceived to disagree with that opinion. They argued that people differ in their willingness to self-censor and introduced an 8-item self-report instrument, the Willingness to Self-Censor scale, to measure this individual difference. The results of an experimental study presented here provide further evidence of the construct validity of the scale. Each participant in the study was presented with a hypothetical scenario that contained information suggesting a group of people the participant was conversing with about a controversial topic held opinions that were either uniformly similar to or different from the participant’s own opinion. Four weeks prior, each participant had responded to the Willingness to Self-Censor scale and a measure of dispositional shyness. As expected, the manipulation of the climate of opinion affected willingness to express an opinion to the group, but more so among those who scored relatively high on the Willingness to Self-Censor scale. These results support the notion that some people rely on information about the climate of opinion more so than do others when they decide whether or not to voice their opinion publicly, and they suggest that the Willingness to Self-Censor scale measures this individual difference.
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