ABSTRACT
Before we can attempt to measure opinions or attitudes, we must, in Mrs. Beeton’s immortal phrase, ‘catch our hare’. This is a very much more complicated matter than it might appear at first. If we want to know the opinion of a given group of people, say, all persons of British nationality entitled to vote, our best plan obviously would be to ask our questions of every one of them. For reasons of expense, time, and practicability, this is nearly always beyond the resources of a private investigator, and even the Gover-ment undertake a complete census only very rarely, and almost never with respect to the measurement of people’s opinions and attitudes.
