Political Knowledge Scales: Something Doesn’t Add Up

In 2012, a Fairleigh Dickinson University (FDU) survey made head­lines. The headlines questioned Fox News viewers’ intelligence. The Nation’s headline read: “It’s Official: Watching Fox Makes You Stupider.” It claimed that “[a] ccording to a new study by Farleigh Dickinson University, Fox viewers are the least knowledgeable audience of any outlet, and they know even less about politics and current events than people who watch no news at all.” It concluded that Fox News “fails the fundamental test of journalism: Are you informing your audience?” The Huffington Post (2012) claimed that “people who only watch Fox News are less informed than all other news consumers.” The New York Times’ Timothy Egan (2014) repeated the assertion. Conservative-leaning publications interpreted FDU’s findings differently. The Examiner’s headline read “Democrats Use Biased ‘Study’ to Smear Fox News.” It claimed that the pollsters “abandoned all integrity to vindictively trash Fox News and peddle the partisan smear that anyone who watches ‘right-wing propaganda’ (anything that includes multiple sides of the story) is stupid.” FDU’s report on its Public Mind Poll (2012) focused not on how respondents answered individual recall questions, but on an aggregate PK scale that FDU manufactured. Like nearly all published PK scales, FDU’s scale was formed by adding the number of correct answers respondents gave to a small set of recall questions. Such scales typically range in value from zero-to-five or zero-to-seven, with the high number representing the total number of recall questions included in the scale. If a respondent answers no questions correctly, they get a score of zero. If they answer all questions correctly, they get the highest possible score. PK scales are regularly used to represent “the range of factual information about politics that is stored in long-term memory.” FDU’s report and the subsequent media reports are based on the finding that Fox News viewers scored lower on FDU’s PK scale than did viewers of other networks. In this chapter, I examine this case and other claims that are based on PK scales.

What Does the Keane PTSD Scale of the MMPI Measure? Repeated Measurements in a Group of Patients with Major Depression

We looked at a group of depressed patients in a treatment study, none of whom by study design had Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). High scores on the PTSD (PK) scale could only be due to factors other than PTSD. Despite the absence of PTSD, we observed an extremely high false positive rate in a group given the MMPI on multiple occasions. 92% of the subjects had at least one T score at or above 65 on the PK scale. 44% of the men and the women had at least one score at or above the more conservative cutoff (a raw score of 28) recommended by Lyons and Keane. The PK scale is sensitive to depression as well as anxiety and PTSD. The PK scale showed multiple high correlations with clinical and validity scales. It was concluded, in agreement with Miller, Goldberg, and Streiner (1995) and Moody and Kish (1989), that the PK scale is primarily a measure of general dysphoria. In populations with considerable psychopathology, the PK scale does not appear to discriminate between patients with and without PTSD.

Diagnosis of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder with the MMPI: Pk Scale Scores in Somatization Disorder

Clinic patients with diagnoses of either major depression or somatization disorder were given the MMPI. Women with somatization disorder had high scores on Keane's MMPI scale (PK) for posttraumatic stress disorder. Following the procedure for the MMPI-2 (46 of the 49 PK items and MMPI-2 norms), 59% of the women with somatization disorder and 21% of the women with major depression would have T scores ≥ 65 on the MMPI-2 scale although none of them were known to have developed psychiatric disorder after exposure to a life threatening event. The PK scale has little use in the differential diagnosis of women patients with somatization disorder.

Extended lithium ion pair indicator scale in tetrahydrofuran

The lithium pK scale has been extended to 25 indicators with a pK range of 9.7-24.4. The resulting scale is compared with the cesium ion pair acidities and to ionic pK's in DMSO and aqueous DMSO.Key words: ion pair acidity, organolithium compounds, indicator, acidity scale.

Psychometric Properties of the Embedded and Stand-Alone Versions of the MMPI-2 Keane PTSD Scale

This study investigated the comparability of the embedded and stand-alone versions of the Keane Posttraumatic Stress Disorder scale ( PK scale) of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 (MMPI-2). Participants were 123 Vietnam theater veterans, 68 of whom (55%) were diagnosed with war zone-related posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In separate testing sessions scheduled two to three days apart, all participants first completed the full MMPI-2 followed by the 46 PK scale items administered in a stand-alone format. Sixty participants completed the stand-alone version again in a third session. In addition, all participants were administered the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-III-R (SCID), including the PTSD module, and completed a number of other questionnaire measures of combat exposure and PTSD. Results indicated that the embedded and stand-alone versions of the MMPI-2 PK scale are quite comparable in terms of mean scores, internal consistency, convergent validity, and diagnostic utility. Use of the standalone version is indicated for assessment applications in which the full MMPI-2 cannot be administered.

Does the Mmpi Ptsd-Pk Scale Measure Robustness?

Research evaluating the diagnostic value of the MMPI PK scale for determining Posttraumatic Stress Disorder has been consistendy positive. Various cutoff points have been suggested, depending on the population studied. The current study, involving a select group of police candidates from middle-sized midwestern towns, suggests that low PK scores may represent robustness. These subjects as a group made low use of health and mental health services and obtained very low PK scores ( T=41), although they made average scores on the clinical scales.