The Experience of Creating and Testing the Diagnostic Technique “Scale of anti-Russianess” (“SAR”)

Abstract

The author’s diagnostic technique of politic and psychological phenomenon of anti-Russianess is described in the article. The latter is defined as a kind of social attitude to a negative (critical) perception of Russia as a state (in political and economic terms) and a country (in cultural terms). The results of empirical research of anti-Russianess among the resi­dents of different political and ideological regions of Ukraine in the spring of 2015 (“Northern East”, “Galicia”, “South” and “East without Donbass”, n = 253, 87 male and 166 female) are presented. These results allowed distinguishing three types of this phenomenon. They are 1) political and economic – critical attitude to domestic and foreign policy of Russia, its economy, and therefore cooperation with it; 2) cultural – antipathy to Russia as a country, its cultural heritage, denial of cultural and historical closeness of the Russians and the Ukrainians; 3) language – a critical attitude to the Russian language and cultural channels of its broadcasts, denial of its official status. The algorithm of creating the author’s questionnaire “SAR” (scale of anti-Russia­ness), which contains 16 items distributed according to the three abovementioned scales, is described. The results of the validity and reliability of this technique are presented. According to them this technique is considered as a promising diagnostic instrument of politic and psychological and sociological studies of mass political (geopolitical) consciousness. The regional peculiarities of anti-Russian attitudes propagation are shown. In particular, it was exposed, that the highest levels of anti-Russianess (by all types) were among habitants from Galicia, and the lowest ones were among habitants from South region. The representatives of East Ukraine as compared to all other regional groups had the highest indexes of standard deviation by all scales.

Keywords: attitudes, Russia, “anti-Russianess”, test, reliability, validity, norms.