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Originally published as:

Samuel A. Stouffer. An Experimental Comparison of Statistical and Case History Methods of Attitude Research. Doctoral Dissertation, University of Chicago. (1930)

Editors' Note:

Editors' notes

This is Samuel Andrew Stouffer's doctoral dissertation. It was the first examination of the comparability of Thurstonian scaling methods and case history methods commonly employed at Chicago, the type of work that we know call qualitative methods. Some have interpreted the results as a "convergent validity" study, an interpretation that Thurstone disapproved of.

Robert E. Faris --- in his history of Chicago sociology --- saw it as the nail in the coffin of the case history approach. Clearly it wasn't, but it seems to have been received in that vein by some at Chicago. The study demonstrated the utility of bothe approaches. Although a comment in an extract from the study presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Society in December of 1930 indicated that Stouffer expected the dissertation to appear in the American Journal of Sociology, as far as we can determine the study has never been published. We suspect that its publication was suppressed.

Reference to the study was made in the discussion of Blumer's critique of The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, the first publication in the Social Science Research Council's project evaluating key post-war contributions to its member disciplines. The study is an important contribution to our understanding of attitude, especially how it is studied today.

We are exceedingly proud of bringing this document into print. This version does not preserve the the appendices which included many of the original case histories. A footnote suggests that those histories are still preserved in the University of Chicago Department of Sociology's archives.

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An Experimental Comparison of Statistical and Case History Methods of Attitude Research

Samuel Stouffer

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Besides his obligation to many other faculty members and graduate students, the writer is under a particularly deep indebtedness to his teacher, Professor Ellsworth Faris, whose criticisms of attitude research encouraged the present study and kept it from going off the track even more times than future research may prove it to have done.

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