Page - 6 - in Rebels without a cause? - ‘Criminals’ and fascism in The Authoritarian Personality

6 Journal of Classical Sociology 00(0) The problem: Sampling and interview situations. The different groups filled in the question- naires in their respective environments – college students in their seminar rooms, union- ists in union offices and labour schools, prisoners in the San Quentin prison. In some cases, the authors were aware that the interview situation had an impact on answering the questions. Service club members, for example, became sceptical and only agreed to fill out the questionnaires when the club’s leadership suggested they do so (Adorno et al., 1950: 24), which was not always the case (Adorno et al., 1950: 129). In his chapter, Mor- row acknowledged that there was an influence of the prison environment on the inter- viewees’ response behaviour, stating that the ‘general atmosphere of the prison [. . .] stresses compulsion and conformity’ (Adorno et al., 195: 819). Since the responses showed a wide variety of scores, however, he believed the interview situation to have had a ‘relatively minor effect’ (ibid.) on the responses. As will be discussed in the following section, the archival material available shows that this was an understatement, i.e. that the effect of the interview situation was far greater than acknowledged. The problem of non-problematisation started with the sampling procedures. San Quentin’s psychiatric department helped with the selection of interviewees, Morrow wrote (Adorno et al., 1950: 818). They excluded all prisoners aged 55 years or older, all ‘feeble-minded’ prisoners, prisoners who had attended less than 8 years of school, as well as African Americans, Jews and people in psychiatric treatment. The result was a sample of 110 respondents, approximately 5% of all San Quentin prisoners.5 Based on very high and very low E scores, 15 interview partners were then singled out for in-depth inter- views. (Of these, eight were classified as high scorers and four as low scorers, three middle scorers were excluded without further explanation.) Regarding their history of delinquency, neither the ‘quantitative’ group of 110 nor the ‘qualitative’ group of 12 in- depth interviews were statistically representative (see Table 1). While fraudsters (‘cheque-writers’) and sex offenders are overrepresented in the quantitative sample, murderers are obviously overrepresented among the qualitative interviewees. This had consequences for the study results. Since sex offenders had achieved higher E scores (cf. Adorno et al., 1950: 848f.), the E scores for the whole quantitative sample were distorted upwards. It also meant a social bias: from the obser- vation of the prison psychiatrist that cheque-writers mostly stemmed from privileged Table 1. Number and quotas of prisoners by ‘crime group’ for the whole San Quentin population, the questionnaire sample and the in-depth interview sample. Criminal offence Prison population Quantitative sample Qualitative sample Quota Number Quota Number Quota Cheque-writing 14% 44 40% 3 25% Burglary, robbery, theft 54% 31 28% 4 33% Homicide 7% 12 11% 4 33% Sex offences 11% 23 21% 1 8% Other 14% 0 0% 0 0% Total 100% 110 100% 12 100%