FACTOR ANALYTIC STUDY OF ORALITY AND ANALITY

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Abstract
The responses of 179 normal adult male subjects to 186 questionnaire items provided the data for analysis. The questionnaire included the following 4 subscales: oral traits, anal traits, mouth habits and bowel habits. The data were treated in the following ways: 1) the responses of the subjects to the entire questionnaire were factor analyzed; 2) the 4 sub-scales were factor analyzed separately; 3) factor scores were calculated for each subject on the factors obtained in the subscale analyses, and these factor scores were intercorrelated; and 4) an inverse factor analysis and cluster analysis were performed. Four main conclusions appeared to be warranted. First, consistent with previous findings that characteristics attributed to the oral and anal character types are empirically associated in the responses of normal adult subjects, an oral trait factor and an anal trait factor emerged from the overall questionnaire factor analysis. Second, factor analyses of the oral trait items and of the anal trait items resulted in oral and anal subfactors that were consistent with psychoanalytic descriptions. Third, in this normal population, despite the kinds of items selected for study, oral and anal character structure were not the most potent organizing factors. Fourth, there was no evidence to support a preferential association between oral traits and mouth habits, or between anal traits and bowel habits.

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