Abstract:

This paper presents an instrument which serves to identify opinion leaders, a simple "strength of personality scale" developed by the Institut fur Demoskopie Allensbach and sponsored by the Spiegel Publishing Company. Testing the instrument with a log-linear procedure demonstrates that the strength of personality variable differentiates at least as well as or better than the variables sex, age and socio-economic status. It is also shown that the instrument demonstrates a high degree of reliability and that it can be validated by an external criterium.