Some Major Problems in the Quantification of Social Attitudes

Attitudes, attitude tests, attitude testers! C. Bird says that 1,500 articles have been written in the last 20 years on social attitudes.' And here is one more! But it is not number 1,501, for over a hundred have appeared since he wrote in 1940. Since then the American Youth Commission alone has published a series of volumes on the attitudes of Negro youths. Imagine trying to find out what a Negro youth thinks away in his heart about the world in which he finds himself! Imagine trying to find out what anyone thinks away deep about any social issue. That is the very thing we are trying to do, and evidently, it is the faith of hundreds of research workers that it can be done and that it is worth doing. Various men will use various techniques or tools. This man will use psychoanalysis to find out what is down deep, another will use a modified form of psychoanalysis, another will use a pencil to write what someone tells him in response to a schedule of questions, and still others will approach with a batch of pencils and test papers designed to aid a subject in thinking way deep. To date we have been stressing the language behavior of people who respond to our questions about how they would act under a set of circumstances, or what they think (opinions) about a

Political science · Psychology · School Choice and Performance · Social Psychology

• Racial attitudes of Negro clients 1

  Olga Verin•Smith College Studies in Social…•1945

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• The Polls and Ethnic Minorities

  Open Access•Robert B Hill•The Annals of the American…•1984

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