ABSTRACT
The study of attitudes and their measurement began to flourish in academic social psychology in the early 1920s, before the advent of the new opinion polls in 1935, and such study became a key piece of the mosaic that would later become survey research. Attitude measurement had nothing like the prestige of experimental psychology. The experimentalists, in fact, thought that things had gone rather too far even by the mid-1920s, when they took a stand at their annual meeting in 1926:
Resolved, that this meeting deplores the increasing practice of collecting administrative or supposedly scientific data by way of questionnaires; and that the meeting deplores especially the practice under which graduate students undertake research by sending questionnaires to professional psychologists.
