EDUCATION, SECURITY, AND POSTMATERIALISM - REPLY

Abramson and Inglehart (1994, this issue) raise a number of reasonable criticisms about our earlier paper. Our reply addresses the shortcomings they identify and points out areas where we believe they are incorrect. We begin with a general point about their critique. First, while we are not fanatics about multivariate analysis, one of the principal criticisms we make is that Inglehart does not subject his hypotheses to multivariate tests. A review of the tables and figures in Abramson and Inglehart's article indicates that they continue to eschew this multivariate strategy that we believe is critical to a proper test of the Inglehart arguments. Moreover, in virtually every section of the critique, they ''refute'' our case by referring to bivariate correlations, either ones they have generated or ones from other studies. With the presentation of simple bivariate findings (with no measures of association), they cannot counter our argument, which at least makes an attempt to specify a multivariate model and gives some indication of the statistical significance of the correlations. Our reply to Abramson and Inglehart follows the four-point organization of their critique.