On 1/14/04 2:36 PM,"Dianne Lewandowski" posted:

"Dianne Lewandowski" posted:


The question was gender neutral. I'm not making a case for one side or
the other. A male can be a homemaker just as can a female. :-) When I


True, but you miss the point that a person, parent can work, and still feel
their children/family is the top priority. Work to live, not live to work.
What is common perception here, is that all working parents have the same
attitude, unless they're "poor & have to"

Ellice, did you take the test?

Yup. Amazingly - I'm evidently right about the same as the Dalai Lama -
alhtough I don't know what that really says about anything. Left of center,
south of authoritarian. Almost dead center of the Lower Left. But what I was
referring to above was your conversation with Elizabeth (IIRC) which was
more open to the whole idea of the working mother, parent - although it
stemmed from the question in the test.

And, FWIW, the question about the homemaker was specific to women, as in "A
mother's primary job is to be a homemaker" - or close to it.

I just haven't felt like jumping in much on this - but I think the questions
were written clearly with some bias. The first, what you felt interesting,
is that they force you to choose a response, and don't allow the "no
opinion" option. The wording on some of the questions is clearly designed to
make you think about which way it's being presented. In statistics, when you
design a test, there is an art to the presentation of a "null hypothesis" -
frequently a problem is stated so that in essence you prove by
contradiction, or set up your basic hypothesis to be what you actually don't
want to show as true. And people who design questionnaires work hard at the
wording - sometimes to put a positive thought first, or to try and bias for
a desired result. It can be very subtle. Even the scales that you use for
your answers have different qualities - the order - do they go from negative
to positive, is it a number, is it a scale, etc.

Honestly, for me - there was no great surprise - I know that I'm a strong
believer in civil liberties, but also somewhat "pragmatic" with regard to
how the world, politics work, and what I feel may be necessary in the course
of protecting the right to live as luxuriously, frivolously, as we do - i.e.
Being able to have nice roads, clean public facilities, schools, sports,
time to do needlework, free time for entertainment. So, in many opinions
that may make me somewhat conservative (not my word) with regard to defense,
the need for it, and where I place my skepticism. Since I know people who
abuse the system - in uniform and out, and in the media - I just share it
all around ;^)

ellice