14 - The University of Chicago Once More

Summary

At first I planned to do my experimental research in collaboration with Professor Allport, who wanted to continue the investigation of temperament he began in his work Studies in Expressive Movement, published in collaboration with Philip Vernon, another Rockefeller scholar, who went on to teach at Cambridge and then London. I was more interested in social research, however. I was also interested in his factor analysis of intelligence and skills, which occasioned round-table discussions about the theory and methodology of factor analysis. Those discussions were only open to his collaborators and a small number of professors from some other universities. Professor Thorndike had recommended that I continue to study factor analysis, since in his opinion it was the most exact methodology for revealing relationships between whole and parts—which is the crucial issue of science. Professor Goangă, on the other hand, believed that introducing the methodology of social attitude measurement to our country was more important and more useful.

In total, Thurstone and his collaborators designed and benchmarked thirtyone scales for examining social attitudes, measuring nationalism versus internationalism, liberalism versus socialism, tradition versus progress, alcohol prohibition versus liberalization, and theism versus atheism. Right after my arrival, I went to Thurstone's office to discuss the object of my research.

“We shouldn't bother finalizing the object, since Professor Ogburn, adviser to President Roosevelt and chairman of the committee for social change with the White House, told me about President Roosevelt's plan to conduct a discreet investigation at five or six universities on the attitudes of youth in academia toward his New Deal. If you agree, I would like to tap you as a collaborator on this research. You are the most appropriate choice, since you cannot be accused of being subjective toward one party or another. The research is funded through government grants to our university.”

As this research was quite urgent, the next day professors Thurstone, Gulliksen, and I put together a list of fifty possible opinions toward Roosevelt's new policies. Opinions ran from the most favorable to the most strongly opposed, with the majority in the middle range. I gave this list to the other collaborators in the factor analysis of intelligence and skills research, as well as to the young sociology professors— Blumer, Wirth, and Cottrell—whom I had befriended the previous summer.