Authoritariansim as indicated by measures of acceptance of authority and directiveness among police officers,students and townspeople

Conclusion Recently theory and scales measuring authoritarianism and cynicism of police have come into close scrutiny. In particular, Langworthy (1987:28,33) has concluded from his review of 21 empirical studies that police cynicism appears to have several different dimensions and that the “failure to detect cynicism or a factor closely related to it is a product of reliance on a very flawed instrument the Niederhoffer index.” To address that criticism of a faulty instrument, this research has utilized scales measuring directiveness and proauthority. For reasons of alpha coefficients, only the scores on the pro-authority scale were analyzed. Mean scores on the pro-authority scale between law officer, students, townspeople and police officers were not significantly different. When investigating variables relating to the high scores of proauthority of police officers, rank was statistically significant while age was not. For future research, separate population should be continued as well as random sampling. In addition, variables of age, sex, ethnic, rank and departmental/organizational dimensions should be explored.