Critical Therapy Antidote

The publication of this recent study in a psychology journal is another hopeful indication that some scholars are starting to breach the walls erected by scholar activists around the academic publishing territory (previous examples include Sedgwick’s paper on psychotherapy’s uncritical acceptance of EDI and the collection of essays on ideological bias in psychology published by Springer).

Here at CTA, we have been very concerned by the almost complete silencing of any critical public debate concerning the arrival of Critical Social Justice (CSJ)-driven therapy – a radically different approach to traditional therapies. The editor and authors contributing to the CTA book have had a direct experience of the difficulties of trying to get critiques published of this ideological capture of our professions (for an account listen – starting at 11.50 – to Thomas’s introduction to Cynical Therapies).

This paper, published in The Scandanavian Journal of Psychology, gives an account of how the author set out to create a psychometrically reliable and valid measure for assessing Critical Social Justice attitudes which was then tested in a university wide study (the abstract is posted below verbatim and in full). This is an important study and it is worth reading the paper in full – the author highlights themes such as the gendered difference in the study results and also flags up the association between holding leftwing political beliefs and poor mental health. For readers who are unfamiliar with academic psychology, don’t be put off by the dense technical language of the abstract – the introduction and discussion elements in the paper are written in a clear and accessible style.

Abstract

Two large studies (combined n = 5,878) set out to construct and validate a scale for assessing critical social justice attitudes. Studies assessed the reliability, factor structure, model fit, and both convergent and divergent validity of the scale. Studies also examined the prevalence of critical social justice attitudes in different populations and the scale’s correlations with other variables of interest, including well-being variables: anxiety, depression, and happiness. Participants for Study 1 (n = 848) were university faculty and students, as well as non-academic adults, from Finland. Participants responded to a survey about critical social justice attitudes. Twenty one candidate items were devised for an initial item pool, on which factor analyses were conducted, resulting in a 10-item pilot version of critical social justice attitude scales (CSJAS). Participants for Study 2 were a nationwide sample (n = 5,030) aged 15–84 from Finland. Five new candidate items were introduced, of which two were included in the final, seven-item, version of CSJAS. The final CSJAS scale had high reliability (α = 0.87, ω = 0.88) and a good model fit (comparative fit index [CFI] = 0.99, TLI = 0.99, root mean square error of approximation [RMSEA] = 0.04, standardized root mean residual [SRMR] = 0.01, χ² (14, 5024) = 132.8 (p < 0.001)) as well as convergent and divergent validity. Overall, the study sample rejected critical social justice propositions, with strong rejection from men. Women expressed more than twice as much support for the propositions (d = 1.20). In both studies, CSJAS was correlated with depression, anxiety, and (lack of) happiness, but not more so than being on the political left was. The critical social justice attitude scale was successfully constructed and validated. It had good reliability and model fit.