ABSTRACT
I onee heard a delightful remark: "Psychologists would rather use each others' toothbrushes than each others' measures" (Bradley, 1998).
All too true? Very often, it seems that one's research problems cannot be resolved by using any existing measure. None of the measures are quite right. But equally often, it seems that there is duplication of effort in test development. Here, for instanee, a historian justly complains about the diversity of measures used by eminent social scientists over a 9-year period, in aseries of studies to assess anti-sernitism (Dawidowicz, 1977, p. 193):
Unfortunately, no-one thought to draw up a uniform scale that rnight be applied to all the surveys . . . Christian Beliefs and Anti-Semitism (Glock & Stark, 1966) used six items for its index; The Apathetic Majority (Glock, Selznick & Spaeth, 1966), three; Protest and Prejudice (Marx, 1967), nine; The Tenacity of Prejudice (Selznick & Steinberg, 1969), eleven (seven of Marx's items were the same as Selznick and Steinberg's). Wayward Shepherds (Stark, Foster, Glock & Quinley, 1971) changed the ground rules and formulated an index that differed from the one used in Christian Beliefs and Anti-Semitism (its predeeessor [Glock & Stark, 1996]). The anti-sernitism index in Adolescent Prejudice (Glock, Wuthnow, Piliavin & Speneer, 1975) consisted of eight items, a few sirnilar to, but none identical with, the eleven-item index in Selznick and Steinberg. Of the various authors, Marx alone employed "positive" items-that is, items favourable toward Jews.
