ABSTRACT
One of the major themes in the development of contemporary sociology has been a steadily increasing interest in problems of measurement. Measuring instruments which were classified as scales or indices typically involved the use of more than one "piece" of information. The American Journal of Sociology, the American Sociological Review, Social Forces, and Sociometry were taken to be representative of the main research currents of American sociology. Every article and every research note in each issue of four journals published from January, 1954, through December, 1965, was examined carefully. To check reliability, 20 per cent of the issues were examined independently by two readers. Continuity in social research may be assessed, at least roughly, by comparing the total number of measurement attempts to the total number of measures used and cited. There were 3,609 attempts to measure various phenomena by the use of scales or indices and 2,080 different measures were used.
