A Cooperative Multinational Opinion Sample Exchange.

The article informs that each of a cooperating group of social psychologists all over the world finds local secondary schools that will donate classroom time to opinion surveys, life history questionnaires, aspiration and value measures and the like. From time to time, each social psychologist develops such a questionnaire which members of other nations translate and administer to their local samples. Thus each cooperating scholar might every three years or so end up with a five or ten nation comparative study of his own devising and might have cooperated with a similar number of other studies. It is the purpose of this report to initiate consideration of the values and problems of such an enterprise. It is believed that such a program would be worthwhile, both in value to participants and in value to social science. Attention will be addressed first to these potential values. The problem of research quality in the light of modern scientific standards will be discussed subsequently. The need for more and better comparative research in social psychology is apparent to all students in the field, and the amount of such research will no doubt increase.