ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with social attitudes or opinions, the approach is appropriate for all of the types of problems mentioned. This rather new approach seems to afford an adequate basis for the quantification of many types of qualitative data. The chapter proposes a rigorous definition of a scale. This definition applies not only to the study of general attitudes, but also to the study of public opinion on specific issues. Reproducibility by itself is not a sufficient test of scalability. A basic concept of the theory of scales is that of the universe of attributes. Scalogram theory shows that if the universe contains but a single variable, that is, if all questions have but a single content ordering, then the same rank order of the individuals upon this content will be obtained regardless of which sample of questions is selected from the universe.
