Create LITERATURE.md

LITERATURE.md

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+A narrow selection of open access articles related to Thurstonian modeling
+
+
+## A Law of Comparative Judgement
+L. L. Thurstone
+
+The object of this paper is to describe a new psychophysical law which may be called the law of comparative
+judgment and to show some of its special applications in the
+measurement of psychological values. The law of comparative
+judgment is implied in Weber's law and in Fechner's law.
+
+
+## An Experimental Study of National Preferences [pdf](https://brocku.ca/MeadProject/Thurstone/Thurstone_1928y.html)
+L. L. Thurstone
+
+The experiment here reported was designed as a rather severe test of the law of comparative judgment. This psychophysical law states the relation between the psychological separation of the stimuli (the sense distance) and the probability of correct discrimination on any single occasion. The law applies ideally to the situation in which a single observer makes several hundred discriminatory judgments for each possible pair of stimuli in any given stimulus series. The stimuli to which the law refers in its conventional psychophysical setting are the lifted weights, the grey papers, the line lengths, and the rest of the traditional stock-in-trade of the psychophysicist. 
+
+
+
+## Attitudes Can Be Measured
+L.L. Thurstone
+
+The object of this study is to devise a method whereby the distribution of attitude of a group on a specified issue may be represented in the form of a frequency distribution. The base line represents ideally the whole range of opinions from those at one end who are most strongly in favor of the issue to those at the other end of the scale who are as strongly against it. Somewhere between the two extremes on the base line will be a neutral zone representing indifferent attitudes on the issue in question. The ordinates of the frequency distribution will represent the relative popularity of each attitude. This measurement problem has the limitation which is common to all measurement, namely, that one can measure only such attributes as can be represented on a linear continuum, such attributes as volume, price, length, area, excellence, beauty, and so on. For the present problem we are limited to those aspects of attitudes for which one can compare individuals by the "more and less" type of judgment. For example, we say understandingly that one man is more in favor of prohibition than another, more strongly in favor of the League of Nations than another, more militaristic than some other, more religious than another. The measurement is effected by the indorsement or rejection of statements of opinion. The opinions are allocated to different positions on the base line in accordance with the attitudes which they express. The ordinates of the frequency distribution are determined by the frequency with which each of the scaled opinions is indorsed. The center of the whole problem lies in the definition of a unit of measurement for the base line. The scale is so constructed that two opinions separated by a unit distance