Read the stated concerns about order without turning a mean into a test of obedience.
The six Authority items concern tradition, parents, elders, teaching respect and a strong leader. The mean describes how well those statements fit your opinions. It does not determine whether any real authority is legitimate or whether you should obey a particular instruction.
Source items 5, 11, 17, 23, 29 and 35 are directly keyed from one to five. Six valid responses produce their own unrounded mean. This presentation does not infer a separate authority score from your answers about Loyalty or public coercion in another questionnaire.
Tradition and authority in the source
The source definition links Authority with deference toward legitimate authorities and defense of traditions understood as providing stability. The six final items ask about several referents: societies, parents, elders, children’s education and a leader. These are not observations of one relationship. A person can regard some traditions as useful while questioning an instruction from a particular authority. The questionnaire does not establish the legitimacy of any institution, and the word strong does not specify every quality a leader might possess. Read the score as a summary of the actual statements.
What a higher mean indicates
A higher mean means these tradition- and deference-oriented statements describe your opinions more closely. It does not show unconditional obedience or approval of every existing hierarchy. You may attach conditions about competence, accountability or the scope of an authority’s role that a short item cannot collect. Those conditions remain important even when the selected rating is high. The result does not tell you which institution deserves trust, how a family should resolve a dispute or what political arrangement is best. These decisions require facts and values beyond the questionnaire.
What a lower mean does not establish
A lower mean indicates less endorsement of these statements, not an inability to cooperate or a wish to create disorder. You might question universal wording, distinguish respect for a person from deference to their role, or believe that traditions should be evaluated individually. Someone can have a low rating on obedience to parents and still value listening carefully to older people. The average cannot identify those patterns on its own. Avoid treating it as evidence that a person is disrespectful, dangerous, politically incompetent or unsuitable for leadership.
A middle mean can combine different views
A mean of 3.00 can arise from six middle responses or from firm but contrasting positions about parents, tradition and leadership. It is not automatically a measured amount of moderate respect. The statements concern different referents, so disagreement between them is worth understanding rather than repairing into an ideal profile. NA is available when a statement cannot capture your position or you do not want to answer it. Any NA withholds Authority’s personal figures under our complete-six rule, without replacing it with a middle response or another foundation’s score.
Six different ratings can average three
For fictional ratings of 4, 2, 3, 5, 1 and 3, the total is eighteen. Eighteen divided by six gives 3.00, even though the individual ratings range from one to five. None is reversed, and none receives extra weight because it mentions a leader or a parent. This example shows exactly why the mean cannot replace the item pattern. If the fifth response becomes NA, the result does not retain 3.00 or divide the remaining seventeen by five. It withholds this group’s personal mean.
Respect and questioning can coexist
Imagine two fictional learners who both value experience. One usually follows a senior person’s advice, while the other asks for reasons before accepting it. Their practical behavior can differ even if both endorse learning from elders. Conversely, someone may comply with an instruction because of a practical constraint while disagreeing with a general claim about authority. A self-report about moral opinions cannot distinguish compliance, respect and trust in every situation. That is why this mean cannot decide whether a real person has acted correctly or whether an instruction should be followed.
Make the condition for respect explicit
Choose one item and describe what you think makes its referent worth listening to: experience, a justified role, reliable knowledge or a contribution to shared order. Then write a fictional case in which that reason would be absent. Compare the cases without using the questionnaire to issue directions about a real institution or family member. This can clarify whether your reservation concerns a principle or an unstated assumption. You may compare Loyalty or Care next, preserve uncertainty or finish; the result prescribes no political destination.
The item bank is not a test of legal legitimacy
English items are pinned to the authors’ public MFQ-2 document and used with the source, attribution and CC BY 4.0 licence made visible. FermatMind’s Chinese working translation and full explanations are identified separately; they are not an official measurement-equivalent edition. The complete-six NA rule is a presentation policy rather than a published clinical threshold. No combined score, obedience type or political-group match is generated. All full guides remain public without an individual’s ratings, while optional saved progress stays temporary in the current browser tab.