Scaling Experience by a Multiple-Response Technique: A Study of White-Negro Contacts

Abstract

SOCIAL experience can be scaled. That is the major hypothesis of this paper.' In testing this hypothesis, the word experience has suffered certain restrictions: (i) we refer to the experiences which white Americans have had with Negroes; (2) we refer to experiences which evoke variable responses, depending upon the individual and his life situation; (3) we avoid references to experiences of a tabooed nature; and (4) we refer to the pencil marks placed upon paper by our subjects. Such pencil marks are not white-Negro experiences of course. Whether they symbolize such contacts, which is the problem of validity, will receive considerable attention here. Three subsidiary hypotheses are examined in this paper: (i) the experiences which an individual reports as his own are generally the same as those he reports for his community; (2) attitude and experience are interdependent; and (3) lectures on race relations will not shift the mean experience scores of students, but they will shift attitude scores. In this work, attitude and experience will refer to scores assigned individuals as the result of their having selected answers on certain scales which purport to quantify these variables. Epistemological doubts, such as, How accurate are recalls of will be omitted from consideration here. Methodological doubts, such as the propriety of summing scores, will be omitted likewise from consideration at this time. Instead, available space will be devoted to describing, (I) the instrument designed to scale experience, (II) its reliability, (III) its validity, and (IV) the extent to which the hypotheses are sustained. The attitude scales employed are those of E. D. Hinckley2 and E. S. Bogardus,3 and the experience scales constructed by the author which appear here for the first time. Uses for Experience Scales. The chief value of such scales of experience, should they prove reliable and valid, lies in the opportunities afforded for checking our theories of the origins of attitude and for checking the interrelation between experience and attitude. Findings reported later show that experience and attitude are indeed positively correlated, in so far as we have

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