Development of Militaristic Attitudes Scale and Its Associations With Turkish Identity and Uninational Ideology

2018-05-01
Özdemir, Fatih
Sakallı, Nuray
It is worthwhile to search the associations among militaristic attitudes, national identity, and uninational ideology empirically because they may be highly relevant to various issues such as support for military actions, using military to solve intergroup conflicts, and the willingness to join the army. The main purpose of the article was to empirically examine the associations among militaristic attitudes, national identity, and uninational ideology. To pursue this aim, we first developed a militaristic attitudes scale, covering attitudes toward military, militarization, and militarism (Study 1); and then explored the predictive powers of Turkish identity and uninational ideology on the militaristic attitudes (Study 2). University students (N = 339; 215 women and 124 men; Md-nage = 23, M-age = 23.84, SD = 4.44) completed an item pool of Militaristic Attitudes Scale and demographic information form in Study 1. Factor analyses of the scale resulted in 5 factors (attitudes toward followings issues: existence of the military [alpha = .95], value of the military [alpha = .89], militaristic system [alpha = .81], political position of military [alpha = .75], and compulsory military service [alpha = .87]). In Study 2, 583 university students (318 women and 265 men; Mdn(age) = 22, M-age = 22.09, SD = 2.32) completed the scales of militaristic attitudes, social identity, and uninational ideology as well as demographic information form. People who strongly identified with Turkish nationalism and supported uninational ideology had higher positive militaristic attitudes after controlling for demographic variables. These studies resulted in a reliable and valid scale to test militaristic attitudes at various levels such as institutional, system based, and ideological. Both studies provided some possible answers about who would support militaristic attitudes more within a society. These results may be useful for researchers who study militarism, militarization, identity, and nationalism.
PEACE AND CONFLICT-JOURNAL OF PEACE PSYCHOLOGY

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Citation Formats
F. Özdemir and N. Sakallı, “Development of Militaristic Attitudes Scale and Its Associations With Turkish Identity and Uninational Ideology,” PEACE AND CONFLICT-JOURNAL OF PEACE PSYCHOLOGY, pp. 175–187, 2018, Accessed: 00, 2020. [Online]. Available: https://hdl.handle.net/11511/36568.