Five economic issue ratings, with welfare reversed and gun ownership retained in the source group.
Read five historical SECS economic items, including welfare reversal and the original gun-ownership grouping, without party or policy predictions.
Read a descriptive issue-warmth mean in its 2013 United States context, without cutoffs or a fixed political identity.
The five-item grouping is part of the edition
The economic set in the 2013 SECS appendix contains limited government, welfare benefits, gun ownership, fiscal responsibility and business. Welfare benefits is reverse scored. Gun ownership is retained here because the original appendix marks it economic, while military and national security belongs to the social set. This may differ from a reader’s intuitive categories. It is a documented historical grouping, not a claim that these words always form one economic philosophy.
Reading a higher keyed mean
A higher descriptive mean indicates warmer feelings toward the four direct terms and/or cooler feelings toward welfare benefits under this key. It does not establish support for every market policy, opposition to every social programme or approval of unrestricted business conduct. Broad phrases do not specify how much government, which benefits, what regulation or whose responsibility is involved. A score cannot supply those missing details.
Reading a lower keyed mean
A lower mean may reflect warmer feelings toward welfare benefits or cooler feelings toward limited government, gun ownership, fiscal responsibility or business. Those responses need not have the same reason. Someone may oppose a particular business practice but value enterprise, or support a benefit while preferring tight oversight. The result does not measure economic knowledge, financial responsibility or membership of a socialist or liberal party.
Mixed preferences need not collapse into a label
A middle mean can represent neutral feelings throughout, or strong but opposing reactions across the five topics. It does not certify moderation, inconsistency or the best balance between public and private activity. The separate social reading may be higher, lower or equal without requiring a tie-breaker. Because the two sets have different content, comparing their numbers does not identify your strongest political belief.
An example with welfare benefits reversed
Suppose welfare benefits receives eighty and the other four items each receive fifty. Its keyed contribution becomes twenty, giving a raw sum of 220 and a descriptive mean of 44.00. If welfare instead receives twenty, its keyed contribution is eighty, the sum becomes 280 and the mean 56.00. These examples explain direction, not population standing or a party threshold. All five ratings must be valid; one NA leaves this domain insufficient even when the social domain is fully rated.
Support for a word is not a detailed policy
Two people may both rate fiscal responsibility warmly while disagreeing about whether a particular budget is responsible. The phrase supplies no accounting test or policy definition. Similarly, views about gun ownership can depend on local history and institutions, making a 2013 United States grouping difficult to transport elsewhere. This edition does not quietly replace such terms with locally familiar policies, because that would create a different item bank.
Separate the phrase from your reason
Privately choose one item and describe the meaning you used. Would a different example or definition change your rating? If so, retain that uncertainty rather than retaking until a preferred label appears. There is no need to debate, disclose a party affiliation or follow another assessment to unlock this guide. You can stop with a clearer statement of what this small historical instrument does and does not ask.
Source, licence and present-day limits
This guide accompanies all five economic items in Everett’s 2013 Social and Economic Conservatism Scale and our Chinese trial translation. The twelve English terms, two reversals and original domain membership come from complete Supplementary Materials 1; the publisher explicitly marks the work CC0. Attribution is preserved. Positive terms keep the selected warmth value; reversed terms use one hundred minus it. We display the unrounded keyed sum divided by five to two decimals on the response scale, not a percentage, percentile or probability. Our presentation and missing-response handling are not independently validated. The original American, time-specific research cannot establish current Chinese or universal validity, and the original paper explicitly anticipates a need for revision. This result is educational, with no diagnosis, voting advice, hiring use or claim about actual conduct.