Seven social issue ratings, with the original abortion reversal.
Read seven historical SECS social items, including abortion reversal, with higher, lower, mixed and insufficient-information explanations.
Read a descriptive issue-warmth mean in its 2013 United States context, without cutoffs or a fixed political identity.
Seven issues in a specific historical context
The SECS was published by Jim A. C. Everett in 2013 and developed around United States political issues. Its social set includes abortion, military and national security, religion, traditional marriage, traditional values, the family unit and patriotism. Abortion is reverse scored. These groupings are retained from Supplementary Materials 1, rather than rebuilt according to how a topic sounds today. The content is a historical issue-based measure, not a universal definition of conservatism or a current Chinese political scale.
Reading a higher keyed mean
A higher descriptive mean reflects warmer feelings toward the six direct social topics and/or cooler feelings toward abortion, under this particular key. It does not establish endorsement of every policy associated with those words. Someone may feel warmly toward family and patriotism yet differ sharply from another respondent about law, institutions or who a tradition includes. The score cannot decide the content or quality of those reasons.
Reading a lower keyed mean
A lower mean describes cooler feelings toward the direct topics and/or warmer feelings toward abortion in this response set. It is not proof of hostility to other people, lack of attachment to family or membership of a liberal party. The original paper primarily designed the scale around conservatism; lower values do not comprehensively measure every form of liberalism, socialism or another ideology. Treat the name as a label for this key, not an exhaustive identity.
Neutral and mixed responses are different
Seven ratings of fifty produce a keyed mean of fifty, but the same mean can arise from sharply different issue reactions. The midpoint is the response scale’s neutral point, not a population average or a certified moderate position. Social and economic readings can also differ. This edition keeps both guides visible and does not pick the larger mean as your dominant politics or create a quadrant-based type.
An example that keeps the reverse key visible
Suppose abortion receives twenty and the other six items each receive fifty. Reversing the first gives eighty; adding six fifties produces a sum of 380. Divide by seven to obtain 54.2857…, displayed as 54.29 on the zero-to-one-hundred response scale. This is arithmetic, not 54.29 percent conservative, a probability or a percentile. Seven valid ratings are required; any NA withholds the personal sum and mean rather than replacing it with fifty.
A term can hide more than one question
Consider the phrase traditional values. A respondent may think of caring for older relatives, while another thinks of a restrictive social rule. Similar warmth ratings would not establish agreement about that rule. Likewise, a feeling toward military and national security does not specify a view about a particular conflict or budget. The original short phrases are preserved to avoid silently rewriting the instrument, while this guide makes their ambiguity explicit.
Clarify one interpretation without chasing a score
Choose one term and privately note what you meant when rating it, and what you did not mean. Ask whether the 2013 United States wording is meaningful in your own context; using NA is appropriate when it is not. You do not need to disclose your political identity, persuade someone or move toward a preferred score. A useful reflection is clearer about the issue and the limits of the question.
Source, licence and present-day limits
English terms and the seven/five grouping follow the paper’s complete twelve-item appendix, not IDRlabs’ separate eighteen-statement test. The PLOS article explicitly provides a CC0 public-domain dedication; author, year and DOI remain credited. Chinese is our trial translation. Our fixed presentation, eleven ten-point choices, NA rule and descriptive mean display are edition choices, without independent validation here. The original paper itself warns that issue meanings vary with time and place and that the scale may need updating after ten years. We do not claim that its 2013 validation establishes current or cross-cultural validity. No diagnosis, moral judgement, voting recommendation, party match or actual behaviour prediction is generated.