5. ESTADO DE LAS AGUAS
5.1.2. CLASIFICACIÓN DEL ESTADO
5.2.2.1 SEGUIMIENTO Y CONTROL DEL ESTADO QUÍMICO
It is not clear from the records whether Guttman was indeed asked to assess the morale of the recruits, or whether he had come forward and offered his services on his own initiative, as he had done before.51 Whatever the case was, that same month, the Research Department—by now
a formal part of the army—began conducting large-scale attitude surveys among the Haganah
51 In several newspaper interviews Guttman had claimed he was asked to assess the morale of the recruits. I was not
able to find other evidence to confirm this. However, a document detailing the Standing Orders of the Information Officer mentions Guttman by name. Article 8 in the “Methods” section specifies, “a department for research will check from time to time what is going on among the members [of the Haganah] by means of directed questionnaires. Headed by Prof. Louis.” Notice the use of the proper name and its contrast to the vague language in which the “method” is described.
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forces in Jerusalem.52 These were the first studies of this kind in this part of the world. Between
March and June 1948—starting when the war was still in its “irregular” phase, largely confined to the city, through the intense days of fighting during the Pan-Arab invasion, to the
establishment of the Israel Defense Army and the lifting of the siege—detailed reports on the state of morale of the HISH, the HIM (Home Guard), the Jerusalem District Medical Service, the Military Police, and the 205 Women Corps battalion were prepared and distributed among the commanding ranks. “The role of the Department,” concluded a report which was submitted to the Brigade Information Office at the end of that period, “was to test, to the extent that was possible, the factors affecting the morale of the soldiers, to measure the mood of the recruited, discover what bothers them, and come to a conclusion on how to improve their social-
psychological military fitness.”53
This preliminary examination of morale-related problems during the early stages of the 1948 Palestine War was a synoptic reenactment of the survey-based troop morale assessment Guttman was part of designing during his WWII consultancy service for the U.S. War
Department.54 In the context of that project, Guttman—the principal methodologist of the Armed
Forces Attitude Research Branch—was tasked with developing a measurement scale for morale.55 Measuring morale in Palestine according to the same procedure the Research Branch
52 Guttman was drafted into the army on April 15, 1948. 53 June report, 2.
54 Guttman served as an expert consultant for the War Department from 1942-1946.
55 “My major assignment was to build a morale scale with respect to performance on the battlefield. …There is no
evidence that prediction of behavior on the battlefield can be made on a priori grounds, and we shall continue to be boxing with shadows in this regard until we get into a position to observe actual battlefield behavior, and where we can pre-test and repeatedly pre-test sets of items. …I have thought much about it, and have discussed it especially with Dr. Cottrell. We do have in mind a type of item of interest and are intending to work together on a morale scale—again, not necessarily performance on the battlefield.” Guttman to Stouffer (September 1, 1942):
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had used would therefore serve two purposes: first, that of reliability testing. Putting the morale scale Guttman had built during the war to the test of replication would show whether the
Guttman scaling method could travel, that is, generate meaningful results on a repeated trial in a different cultural setting.56 Second, it was a golden opportunity for Guttman to prove his worth
and the restore the credibility of survey measurement (after the radio study had failed to do so). Staging a public demonstration of his instrument would prove its superiority to military
reasoning, and tip the scales, so to speak, in favor of his expert authority.
Guttman began inquiring into the logic of psychosocial measurement before WWII, but it was during the war, under the pressure of the practical situation—the demand for broadly
applicable and user-friendly methods that could produce quick yet accurate results at a competitive cost—that Guttman scaling, the method of measurement bearing his name, was given its mature form.57 Hoping initially to construct a factor analysis for qualitative data,
Guttman proceeded to work on a single-factor, unidimensional scaling for such data.58 “In a
great deal of research in the social and psychological sciences,” he explained the purpose of scaling in a widely cited article from 1944, “it is often desired…to be able to summarize data by
Memorandum, “Work of Dr. Guttman for the past Six Weeks.” See also: Cottrell to Stouffer (August 27, 1942): “Review of Selected Literature on Military Morale.” NARA
56 For more on traveling methods, see: Rebecca Lemov, Database of Dreams: The Lost Quest to Catalog Humanity
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), Chapter 2.
57 Guttman’s war-work simplified work he had done in the logic of measurement during his doctoral studies, while
spending a year at Chicago University under the guidance of Stouffer. See Louis Guttman, “The Quantification of a Class of Attributes: A Theory and Method for Scale Construction,” in The Prediction of Personal Adjustment, ed. Paul Horst (New York: Social Science Research Council, 1941), 319-348.
58 Louis Guttman, “An Outline of Some New Methodology for Social Research,” The Public Opinion Quarterly 18
(1954): 395-404. Scaling is the branch of measurement that involves the construction of an instrument associating qualitative constructs with quantitative metric units. Scaling evolved out of efforts in psychology (and education) to measure “immeasurable” abstract constructs like authoritarianism or self-esteem. In most scaling, the objects are text statements, usually statements of attitude or belief. To scale these statements, they are assigned numbers according to a rule. On the history of attitude scaling, see: Jean M. Converse, Survey Research in the United States; Roots and Emergence, 1890-1960, rev. ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2009), 62-77.
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saying, for example, that one marital couple is better adjusted than another marital couple, or that one person has a better opinion of the British than has another person, or that one student has a greater knowledge of arithmetic than has another student.”59 This has so far been quite difficult
to achieve. This type of empirical observations—the trials and tribulations of married life, national feelings toward our ‘stiff upper lipped’ political allies, numerical intelligence—did not render themselves easily to classification and ordering, and existing methods of analysis, Guttman went on, were neither rigorous enough nor economical: they required elaborate mathematical manipulations, were extremely laborious and time-consuming, and could not be used with large datasets and therefore outside the college classroom.60
More fundamentally, though, available theoretical models of ordered structures of data— or scales—have failed so far to overcome the major source of error in the measurement of social attitudes and opinions, namely, the problem of “response consistency.” “Obviously,” Guttman wrote, “if a [survey] question means different things to different respondents, then there is no way that the respondents can be ranked in order of favorableness.”61 Meaning indeterminacy was
not an occasional difficulty, he emphasized, but rather a structural feature of measurement-by- asking-questions62: “questions may appear to express but a single thought and yet not provide the
59 Louis Guttman, “A Basis for Scaling Qualitative Data,” American Sociological Review 9, no. 2 (1944): 139. 60 Gallup, like other prominent pollsters of the prewar era, remained convinced that scaling was an academic matter,
which was rather irrelevant for the practical business of opinion polling. See: Converse, Survey Research in the United States, 193.
61 Louis Guttman, “The Basis for Scalogram Analysis,” in Measurement and Prediction, vol. 4 of Studies in Social
Psychology in World War II, ed. Samuel A. Stouffer et al. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1950), 61.
62 As Strack and Schwarz explain, asking questions has been perhaps the most widely used method in the social
sciences to measure characteristics of people and their behavior that are not directly observable, such as attitudes or motivations. Standardized questioning in survey situations is one of several models of measurement-by-asking- questions (psychometric testing being another widespread model). Fritz Strack and Norbert Schwarz, “Asking Questions: Measurement in the Social Sciences,” in Psychology's Territories: Historical and Contemporary
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same kind of stimulus to different people. The responses even to the simplest question can differ in kind as well as degree.” If that is the case, then, “how can one tell if there is enough
consistency in the responses of a population to a series of questions to indicate that only a single factor is being measured?”63
What was needed was a safe (aka objective) way of determining the underlying unity and reality of the concept being measured without relying on ordinary language to convey content consistency. Guttman’s ingenuous idea for how to do that, Jack Elinson explained, was that of an ordinal scale.
[What Louis did was to devise a test for unidimensionality, whether the thing measured was indeed a single dimension in the same way that any ordinal scale would be.] The typical measures in psychology at the time—psychometrics, attitude scales, aptitude scales, intelligence scores and so one—they just had an idea what content was and they added them up and provided a number to it: how many were right, how many were wrong, favorable, unfavorable, etc. But Louis was very rigorous in his approach; he couldn’t have ‘more or lesses’ unless it came from a single dimension. For example, when you have height: even if you don’t know the exact height (that would make it a cardinal scale), you know that this chair is higher than this table; it’s always higher than this table, which is always higher than this carpet. The relation between these three would be the same under any circumstances if it [height] was a single dimension. That’s the property of an ordinal scale.
Put simply, Guttman’s solution was to treat feelings the same way one treats height or temperature. It is in this sense that scalogram analysis, the scaling method and procedure Guttman developed, constituted an altogether “new approach” to the problem of scaling. In contrast to earlier approaches, it did not focus on the a-priori ranking of survey questions or statements, which inevitably relied on some pre-conceived definition of content to which these
Perspective from Different Disciplines, ed. Mitchell G. Ash and Thomas Sturm (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2007), 225-250.
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questions or statements assumingly expressed (and thus inevitably fell into the black hole of question meaning), but rather on the ranking of individuals, which did not require such a definition. As Stouffer wrote in his overview introduction to Measurement and Prediction,
Guttman offered a model, which dispenses with the concept of a latent or underlying continuum to which a response to a particular item is to be related. [Instead] he considered an attitude area “scalable” if responses to a set of items in that area arranged themselves in certain specified ways…[so that] persons who answer a given question favorably all have higher ranks than persons who answer the same question unfavorably. From a respondent’s rank or scale score we know exactly what items he endorsed. Thus we can say that the response to any item provides the definition if the respondent’s attitude.
The key notion here is that of arrangement “in certain specified ways”: Guttman’s method used graphical reordering of responses to see if a certain pattern or configuration of the data would emerge. The emerging pattern allows the researcher todeduce the rank-order of the questions independently of their content. Hence, questionnaire design did not require a priori assumptions about rank ordering. The organizing of complex data sets was done so that they generated a legible pictorial representation an unskilled clerk could “read” which in turn made Guttman scaling suitable for mass administration in extra-academic contexts, thus
revolutionizing socio-psychological measurement:
This approach has been used successfully for the past year or so in investigating morale and other problems in the United States Army... Simple routines have been established which require no knowledge of statistics, which take less time than the various manipulations now used by various investigators...and which give a complete picture of the data not afforded by these other techniques. The word "picture" might be interpreted here literally, for the results of the analysis are presented and easily assimilated in the form of a "scalogram," which at a glance gives the configuration of the qualitative data (emphasis mine).64
Jack Elinson, who worked with Guttman at the Pentagon, recalled how it was done in practice:
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We would have a piece of paper, with the scores…and the answers to questions vertically, and this was entry by pencil and paper, with check marks for yesses and so on. Then in order to rearrange the items in the questionnaire, he would cut this into strips and hang those strips on the Pentagon’s wall, and then move the strips around. And then when they “order-arrange” from high to low, he would paste these strips of papers back again, with scotch-tape, and cut them the other way, in order to arrange the scores of the men, which men were highest and which men were the lowest. And he’d finally end up with the best fit of the set of
responses to the set of questions by this particular sub-sample, and then the question was whether that particular set of items “hang together” as a scale, whether they were “scalable.”65
While assessing the Guttman scale for a small number of questions and responders can be done by hand, the standard procedure used by the Research Branch involved the use of a
‘scalogram board,’ a physical wooden board Guttman had invented and designed especially for this purpose. The board was used as a visual aid to facilitate the prodigious labor of computing correlations, for it enabled one to see in a shorter time how each item related to others and to the whole. The board provided holes in 100 rows for persons and 100 columns for answer
categories, and each respondent’s answers were recorded by distributing metal shots in holes. Because slats in the board could be shifted to change the position of rows and columns (i.e. of items and respondents), the board could be manipulated to reveal a scale pattern if one existed. The board would also make it graphically obvious what questions fell outside the scale,
indicating that they did not contribute to the measured entity.66
65 Nurit Guttman, video interview with Jack Elinson, 1997. The Guttman Family Collection.
66 Edward A. Suchman, “The Scalogram Board Technique for Scale Analysis,” in Measurement and Prediction, 91-
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Figure 5: One of the two original scalogram boards, Jerusalem (photo taken by author, May 2008)
Scalogram analysis, however, did not completely overcome a known conundrum in survey measurements—that percentages of respondents “favorable” and “unfavorable” toward a particular issue often varied with different phrasing of the questions:
In the course of continuing surveys of attitudes and opinions of the men in the US Army during the war, a perplexing problem arose that seems also to occur in civilian surveys. In a large number of cases, it was found that differently worded questions dealing with the same issue produced different percentages of the population as apparently 'favorable'. Slight changes in phrasing, in the order of presentation of answer categories, in the position of the question in the
questionnaire...yielded apparently different polling results. Which of the results was the correct one?67
Similarly, even after extensive pretest interviewing, “the judgment of what was an ‘unbiased’ question was a rather subjective matter, and that there could be little hope for agreement even among ‘experts’ as long as they could rely only on intuition.” Thus, this so-
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called “interviewer effect” was not merely a reflection of lack of skill or experience in questionnaire design:
The analysts of the Research Branch ... which conducted these surveys, had considerable practical experience in the construction and analysis of questionnaire studies. Yet ... they often would not agree as to the best wording of a question. It became very apparent that judgment of what was an 'unbiased' question was a rather subjective matter, and that there could be little hope for close agreement even among 'experts' as long as they could only rely on intuition.68
In fall 1947, Guttman and Edward Suchman, his wartime collaborator at the Research Branch (the former was still affiliated with Cornell; the latter with the SSRC), published an article declaring they had found a solution to the “perplexing problem” of question bias (also known as the problem of question wording), which has long plagued opinion and attitude analysts. The solution, presented in the article, was described as “an objective method of dividing respondents into pro and con groups which are relatively independent of question wording.”69
The underlying reasoning behind this solution is the observation that “intensity of feeling decreases as one moves toward the middle from either end until one reaches a point of least intensity.” In other words, respondents feel strongest (or have the least doubt) about questions or statements that express extreme views, either positive or negative. Conversely, there is a middle point of lowest intensity—and once this point is identified it “serves to divide the population into positive and negative.” Guttman goes on to demonstrate empirically that this point is an
“objective zero point”: it “will stay fixed regardless of the particular opinion questions used or of
68 445, emphasis mine.
69 Edward A. Suchman and Louis Guttman, “A Solution to the Problem of Question ‘Bias’,” The Public Opinion
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the way they are worded.”70 Hence, such a number allows the researcher to state that, for
example, the American soldiers during WWII had lower morale than the British soldiers even if the comparison is based on two different sets of questionnaires administered by different
researchers.
These developments amounted to inventing the ‘perfect scale’: a technique that promised to be a universal data analysis tool, the “adjustable wrench” of survey-based attitude and opinion research. The set of procedures Guttman has devised—involving multi-step graphical
representations of survey responses—allowed him to treat attitudes, for the first time, like height or temperature: they can be measured and compared to one another, even between cultures, time points and researchers.