ABSTRACT
The concept of measurement has generally meant the assignment of numbers to objects with the condition that the numbers obey the rules of arithmetic. This concept of measurement requires a ratio scale-one with a non-arbitrary origin of zero and a constant unit of measurement. L. L. Thurstone has provided the concept of stimulus dispersion to describe the variability of the scale positions on a psychological continuum. The distinction which has been made between quantitative and qualitative scales is of fundamental importance to the theory of psychological scaling. In order to study the feasibility of this unfolding technique and to compare several different psychological scaling techniques an experiment was conducted in several classes in the Department of Social Relations at Harvard University. While the data with which the readers deal in the vast majority of scaling experiments are qualitative and non-numerical there are certain relations between the manifest data and the metric relations of the continuum.
