Increased use of scales in data-driven consumer digital platforms and the management of organisations has led to greater interest in understanding social and psychological measurement expertise and techniques as historically constituted ‘technologies of power’ in the making of what Stark has labelled the ‘scalable subject’. Taking a genealogical approach, and drawing on published and archival data, this article focuses on self-rated health, a scale widely used in population censuses, national health surveys, patient-reported outcome measurement tools, and a variety of digital (...) apps. The article suggests that the first methodological articulation of self-rated health by the investigators of the Cornell Study of Occupational Retirement (1951–58) provides a window into the key epistemic, institutional, and cultural uncertainties about psychological and social measurement, processes of adjustment to ‘old age’, and the capacity of individuals to value their own health. I propose that these uncertainties have become incorporated into extant and operational measurements of health. (shrink)

In interwar Vienna, Paul F. Lazarsfeld and his colleagues developed an approach to survey research that used the questionnaire and the direct, face-to-face interview to gather data about subjective experience for aggregative analysis. For these young researchers, the questionnaire-based interview emerged from a contradictory set of Central European intellectual traditions and political concerns. Enthusiasm on the political left for quantification and the gathering of social data encouraged survey research; yet, local political allies and intellectual mentors also opposed the study of (...) individual attitudes and the quantitative aggregation of such material. Academic psychology legitimized the use of “introspection” and facilitated the extension of this method to populations of untrained subjects. The methodological concept of the “model” helped overcome the Verstehen/Erklären dichotomy within debates over the proper methods of the human and social sciences. This article examines methodological and philosophical statements, study designs, and questionnaires to explain how the interview gained particular importance within this setting. (shrink)

This introduction to the following five articles discusses concepts, practices and debates before and after the adoption of the term “questionnaire” in the late nineteenth century. Information gathering by way of itemized questions was established in the early modern period (c. 1500–1700). Developments associated with questionnaires in the modern period (such as mass standardized items) began in the late 1800s; but there was significant scrutiny of the questionnaire itself in the decades between the two World Wars.

In the late 19th century, the questionnaire was one means of taking the case study into the multitudes. This article engages with Forrester’s idea of thinking in cases as a means of interrogating questionnaire-based research in early American psychology. Questionnaire research was explicitly framed by psychologists as a practice involving both natural historical and statistical forms of scientific reasoning. At the same time, questionnaire projects failed to successfully enact the latter aspiration in terms of synthesizing masses of collected data into (...) a coherent whole. Difficulties in managing the scores of descriptive information questionnaires generated ensured the continuing presence of individuals in the results of this research, as the individual case was excerpted and discussed alongside a cast of others. As a consequence, questionnaire research embodied an amalgam of case, natural historical, and statistical thinking. Ultimately, large-scale data collection undertaken with questionnaires failed in its aim to construct composite exemplars or ‘types’ of particular kinds of individuals; to produce the singular from the multitudes. (shrink)