Stouffer, Samuel A.

English

University of Chicago Law School: Chicago Unbound

COMMENT BY SAMUEL A. STOUFFERtThe authors of this searching and lucid discussion of opinion research haveasked me for some comments. The generosity with which they have treated mybook would be ill repaid if I quibbled over details. There is, however, one impor-tant point upon which I feel moved to comment, not because the authors and Idisagree, but because I want to be sure that its implications are not overlooked.The point concerns a query which lawyers, in particular, like to make: If themeaning of each given question is ambiguous or otherwise subject to error, isnot the entire research based on such questions meaningless?The answer is: Perhaps such research is meaningless and perhaps not. Butthe important point is that we have methods of testing whether or not use ofsuch questions is meaningful.One such method is the use of a scale. If people who say, "All Communistsshould be put in jail," all mean the same thing by their answers there is noproblem. But the word Communists will mean different things to differentpeople. If it were extremely ambiguous, then we would find large inconsistenciesin the relationship between answers to this item and answers to other items suchas: "If a person wanted to make a speech in your community favoring govern-ment ownership of the railroads and big industries, should he be allowed tospeak or not?" If we look at a cluster of such items we may find by the technicalprocedures of scaling that there is no pattern of consistency between answers tothe jail question and the others. Then we would know that the jail question,either because of ambiguity or because of some other idiosyncracy of meaning,is not helpful in rank-ordering people along a single dimension of permissivenesstoward non-conformists. Actually, the jail question passed the test of internalconsistency in the study being reviewed. This still does not mean that theanswers should now be interpreted literally in terms of jailing Communists, butrather that the answers are meaningfully relevant to the problems of rankingpeople according to their degree of permissiveness.Furthermore, it should be noted that appropriate scaling procedures shouldquickly discover whether respondents too frequently were careless in theiranswers or so indifferent that they answered more or less at random. Indeed,scaling even can serve to some extent (though not infallibly) to uncover lying,because it is hard for individuals to lie with the kind of internal consistencyrequired to produce a good scale.Finally, a good scale is a more reliable measure than any of the individualitems that compose it, just as an average, in general, is a more reliable measurethan the individual errorful measures which are added up to compute it.t Director of the Laboratory of Social Relations, Harvard University.THE ART OF OPINION RESEARCH 65It is quite possible that training in simple measurement theory may some daybe as important in legal training as is elementary exposure to the theory of costaccounting. I am not a lawyer, but I find that the sharply disciplined minds ofsome of my lawyer friends grasp the essential logic of such problems morequickly and easier than do a few of my less rigorous colleagues with training inpsychology or the social sciences.COMMENT BY PAUL F. LAZARSFELDtThe social scientist needs very badly at this moment careful analyses ofmajor research endeavors. The two authors have rendered a real service, notonly to the lay public and advanced student, but to the research fraternityitself, which needs continuous self-awareness of its procedures. While one can-not but agree with most everything the authors say, there are two points whichdeserve special attention, and a few words of elaboration.A survey like Stouffer's should, in part, be looked upon as a piece of con-temporary history. Undoubtedly, there will one day be a great deal of writingon the atmosphere of freedom in the mid-twentieth century, just as there hasbeen much on the medieval mind or on the spirit of the Renaissance. The his-torian of the future, however, will have survey data at his disposal. Althoughsuch data, being relatively precise, invites more immediate generalization andinterpretation, it is not different from other historical data. If Lord Acton as-serts that power corrupts, the only way to prove it is to look at many instanceswhere people came to power and to see what it did to them, under what cir-cumstances it corrupted them and so forth. We would most likely find thatpower doesn't always corrupt, and that very often when it appears to do so therelationship is actually the reverse. Corrupt people are sometimes more likelyto get to power. In a way, we have the same situation when Stouffer finds acorrelation between perception of the Communist danger and permissiveness.1Under other circumstances and in other historical situations such a correlationmight not exist. For instance, the extent to which people are aware of the dangerof atomic warfare probably has very low correlation with the extent to whichthey engage in war-preventing activities; or if an economic depression or someother major issue were to capture national attention, even in regard to Com-munism, the correlation which Stouffer found might be much lower. Within hisown data one could draw interesting inferences as to the variation of the find-ings. Groups for which the correlation is relatively low either might not believet Chairman, Department of Sociology, Columbia University.1 Incidentally, I completely agree with the use of the term "permissiveness" instead of"tolerance." As a matter of fact, that term is being used by a Columbia University group in asurvey on academic freedom.

[The Art of Opinion Research: A Lawyer\u27s Appraisal of an Emerging Science: Observations on  Communism, Conformity, and Civil Liberties ]: Comment

https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2990&amp;context=uclrev

[The Art of Opinion Research: A Lawyer\u27s Appraisal of an Emerging Science: Observations on Communism, Conformity, and Civil Liberties ]: Comment

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