White South Africans' Reactions to Black Advancement: A Two-Sample Confirmatory Investigation of the Structure of Attitude Using an Analogy to the Multitrait-Multimethod Design

The tripartite (affective, conative, cognitive) theory of attitude has been investigated in a number of empirical studies, with findings mostly favoring the theory. Little attention has been paid, however, to other important characteristics of attitude. One of these is multiplexity which refers to the number of separate domains into which an attitude object can be partitioned. In this study, a data design was used which made it possible to investigate trait and domain structure simultaneously. A questionnaire measuring affective, conative, and cognitive responses to three aspects of black advancement was administered to two groups of white South Africans: English speakers employed by a large private-sector company and Afrikaans speakers employed by the government. Confirmatory techniques were employed to investigate the structure of the data. Single-group analysis procedures adapted from Widaman (1985) were initially performed to establish a model satisfactory for both samples. Multi-group procedures were then performed on the two samples to investigate group differences in data structure. The structure was very similar in the two samples with the exception that domain variances were smaller in the English-speaking sample.