ABSTRACT
Louis Guttman offered a model which dispenses with the concept of a latent or underlying continuum to which the response to a particular item is to be related. He considered an attitude area "scalable" if responses to a set of items in that area arranged themselves in certain specified ways. Guttman and his associates in the Research Branch developed simple and practical techniques for testing hypotheses as to whether attitude areas were scalable by this definition. The scalogram hypothesis is that the items have an order such that, ideally, persons who answer a given question favorably all have higher ranks on the scale than persons who answer the same question unfavorably. From a practical standpoint, the operational procedures developed in the Research Branch for swiftly evaluating a large number of questions simultaneously may rank as one of the major contributions of the Branch to social science technique.
