Syracuse University Self-Survey Opinion Battery

Abstract

The Syracuse University Self-Survey Opinion Battery (SUSSOB) is a multidimensional psychometric instrument developed in 1950 by Norville M. Downie, C. Robert Pace, and Maurice E. Troyer. Designed during the post-World War II transformation of American higher education, the instrument was engineered to assess undergraduate ideological orientations, sociocultural perspectives, and aesthetic dispositions relative to the institutional objectives of a liberal general education curriculum. The battery comprises 60 items organized into 10 distinct, 6-item thematic scales: Politics, Government, Civic Relations, The World, Experts, Science, Philosophy, Music, Art, and Literature. Respondents record their positions using a structured three-point trichotomous response format (1 = agree, 2 = no opinion at all, 3 = disagree). A defining methodological attribute of the SUSSOB is its criterion-referenced, consensus-based scoring architecture: institutional faculty members completed the battery as disciplinary experts, and the modal expert consensus for each item served as the criterion key against which student responses were benchmarked. This scoring model enabled researchers to quantify the degree to which undergraduate students assimilated liberal-humanist values, rationalist epistemologies, and democratic civic sensibilities over the course of their academic matriculation. Psychometric evaluations of the instrument revealed robust split-half and internal consistency coefficients for an omnibus inventory of its era, marked cross-sectional differentiation between matriculating freshmen and graduating seniors, and coherent inter-subscale correlations aligning with broader latent constructs of intellectual maturity and social sophistication. The SUSSOB represents a foundational artifact in institutional research, affective curriculum evaluation, and the empirical measurement of general education outcomes.

Keywords

Syracuse University Self-Survey Opinion Battery, SUSSOB, General Education Assessment, Higher Education Psychometrics, Student Attitudes, Faculty-Student Alignment, Consensus-Based Scoring, Institutional Evaluation, Curricular Outcomes, Affective Domain Assessment

Authors

The Syracuse University Self-Survey Opinion Battery was conceptualized, validated, and administered under the auspices of the Evaluation Service Center and the Psychological Research Center at Syracuse University. The primary investigators responsible for its publication and psychometric operationalization were:

• Norville M. Downie, Ph.D. — Research Associate at the Evaluation Service Center, Syracuse University; later Professor of Psychological Sciences at Purdue University, specializing in measurement theory, educational testing, and statistics.
• C. Robert Pace, Ph.D. — Director of the Evaluation Service Center and Professor of Higher Education at Syracuse University; later distinguished psychometrician at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), internationally celebrated for developing the College Student Experiences Questionnaire (CSEQ) and pioneering institutional climate measurement.
• Maurice E. Troyer, Ph.D. — Vice President of the Evaluation Service Center and Professor of Education at Syracuse University; prominent mid-century authority on institutional self-surveys, comprehensive student personnel evaluation, and affective educational objectives.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Syracuse University Self-Survey Opinion Battery was to operationalize and evaluate the intangible, non-cognitive outcomes of a university-wide general education curriculum. Following the demographic and institutional pressures catalyzed by the post-WWII Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944 (the G.I. Bill), universities faced the urgent challenge of demonstrating whether institutional curricula cultivated informed, enlightened, and tolerant democratic citizens or merely imparted narrow vocational competencies.

The development of the SUSSOB served several distinct diagnostic and institutional functions:

• Curricular Program Evaluation: The scale provided institutional leadership with systematic empirical data regarding student belief systems across ten liberal arts domains, illuminating curricular strengths and instructional blind spots within the general education sequence.
• Faculty-Student Alignment Diagnostics: By establishing the modal judgment of the faculty as an evaluative benchmark, the SUSSOB assessed the degree of intellectual convergence between learners and the academic community, identifying domains where undergraduate worldviews remained resistant to scholastic socialization.
• Longitudinal and Cross-Sectional Growth Tracking: The battery was designed to monitor attitudinal shifts across undergraduate cohorts, allowing administrators to compare the maturity, civic tolerance, and aesthetic openness of freshmen against graduating seniors.
• Countering Academic Cynicism and Dogmatism: The items were constructed to identify latent forms of political alienation, authoritarian civic sentiments, ethnocentric biases, anti-intellectual skepticism toward scientific and economic expertise, and reactionary aesthetic preferences.

Beyond institutional self-study, the battery occupied an important niche in applied psychometric research, serving as a prototype for criterion-referenced attitude scaling in naturalistic higher education environments without relying on circular or self-congratulatory self-report satisfaction metrics.

Psychological Construct

The overarching construct assessed by the SUSSOB is Liberal-Intellectual Orientation and General Education Alignment. Rather than evaluating factual knowledge acquisition, the instrument gauges an individual's endorsement of modern democratic values, cognitive openness, scientific empiricism, and sophisticated aesthetic appreciation.

This macro-construct is operationalized across ten substantive subscales, each encompassing six discrete propositions:

1. Politics

Measures belief in representative democratic processes, political agency, and systemic efficacy versus political cynicism, feelings of disenfranchisement, and fatalism. Illustrative items probe perceptions regarding the utility of lobbying legislators, the responsiveness of political parties, and the rational judgment of an informed electorate.

2. Government

Examines sociopolitical philosophies regarding state regulation, the role of planning in democratic governance, ideological distinctions between totalitarian regimes, and the preservation of civil liberties within modern socialist and mixed-market systems. It captures the tension between laissez-faire constitutionalism and social-democratic reform.

3. Civic Relations

Evaluates adherence to pluralistic, egalitarian principles, civil rights, and intercultural tolerance versus authoritarian child-rearing attitudes, xenophobia, racial segregationism, and nativist prejudice. Items assess endorsement of equal rights for minorities, Jewish individuals, and the foreign-born.

4. The World

Focuses on internationalism, global interdependence, multilateralism, and cosmopolitan humanitarianism. It contrasts collaborative international governance (e.g., supranational authority for the United Nations and global standard-of-living parity) with economic protectionism, hyper-nationalist isolationism, and zero-sum geopolitical hostility.

5. Experts

Assesses epistemic trust in specialized professional training, academic expertise, and institutional knowledge. Domains probed include public health diagnostics, economic forecasting, psychological personnel matching, and the societal worth of manual versus professional vocations.

6. Science

Measures scientific literacy, belief in technological progress, epistemological boundaries of empirical verification, and institutional endorsement of state-sponsored funding for both natural and social sciences. It evaluates optimism concerning the potential of applied science to eliminate systemic social problems such as poverty, illness, and ignorance.

7. Philosophy

Probes normative ethics, personal value systems, moral relativism, and existential teleology. Items contrast principled integrity, intrinsic pursuit of truth, and moral commitment with Machiavellian pragmatism, utilitarian expediency, and materialistic pursuit of financial prestige.

8. Music

Assesses openness to contemporary, complex, or unconventional compositional techniques, modern harmonic idioms, and cultural democratization of high art via mass media (e.g., classical radio broadcasting). It contrasts aesthetic receptivity with rigid adherence to conventional melodiousness and relativistic anti-intellectualism.

9. Art

Evaluates visual aesthetic sophistication, acceptance of modern artistic movements (impressionism, cubism, expressionism, surrealism), functional modernist architectural paradigms, and integrated appreciation of art as central to human flourishing rather than a trivial hobby.

10. Literature

Measures critical literary maturity, tolerance for avant-garde linguistic styles (e.g., James Joyce, Gertrude Stein), discernment regarding commercial best-seller lists versus canonical literary merit, and resistance to moralistic censorship that seeks to prohibit literature from critiquing conventional social norms.

Theoretical Framework

The intellectual foundations of the SUSSOB lie at the intersection of mid-20th-century educational philosophy and classical psychometric attitude measurement. Conceptually, the battery was heavily informed by the General Education Movement, epitomized by the seminal Harvard Committee Report, General Education in a Free Society (1945), and the President's Commission on Higher Education (1947). These frameworks argued that specialized vocational training alone produces technocrats who are vulnerable to demagoguery and ideological extremism. A free society requires higher education to cultivate cognitive flexibility, critical discernment, democratic civic engagement, and ethical clarity.

Psychometrically, the SUSSOB synthesizes principles of Louis Leon Thurstone's equal-appearing intervals and Rensis Likert's summated rating techniques, but introduces an operational innovation: expert criterion-referencing. Classical attitude scales often assume that the construct is linear and that agreement directly reflects favorable or unfavorable valence toward an abstract object. In the SUSSOB, the latent construct is framed as scholastic-cultural maturity, defined operational-empirically by the collective judgment of the university faculty.

This approach is theoretically congruent with Social Judgment Theory and social learning paradigms in higher education, wherein faculty serve as socializers transmitting normative academic values. The scale's design acknowledges that on complex civic and aesthetic matters, “correctness” cannot be established through pure physical deduction, but emerges from the informed consensus of a scholarly community. Thus, student divergence from faculty consensus represents an attitudinal gap that general education curricula are explicitly tasked with bridging.

Validity

The validation of the SUSSOB combined content, construct, and criterion-related strategies aligned with mid-century psychometric standards:

Content and Face Validity

Content validity was established through systematic curriculum mapping across general education offerings at Syracuse University. An interdisciplinary faculty panel drafted, reviewed, and pruned an initial item pool to ensure exhaustive coverage of political, institutional, scientific, philosophical, and aesthetic spheres. Items were screened to avoid purely factual recall, demanding instead reflective value judgments and ideological interpretations.

Consensus and Criterion-Referenced Validity

Criterion-referenced validity was directly embedded in the scoring protocol. The battery was administered to representative cross-sections of Syracuse University faculty members across the humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences. Items displaying high faculty dissensus were eliminated or revised, ensuring that keyed “correct” options reflected a robust institutional consensus (>65–75% agreement among experts). This transformed the battery into an authentic criterion benchmark.

Construct Validity: Cross-Sectional and Group Differentiation

Empirical construct validity was evidenced by the instrument's capacity to detect anticipated cross-sectional differences across academic classifications:

• Academic Class Year Progression: In the primary validation cohort reported by Downie, Pace, and Troyer (1950), graduating seniors demonstrated statistically significant increases in consensus alignment scores compared to entering freshmen. The greatest convergence occurred within the Civic Relations, Art, and Literature subscales, reflecting the mitigating influence of undergraduate instruction on ethnocentrism, provincialism, and aesthetic conservatism.
• Major Field Discrepancies: Systematic variations emerged when disaggregating scores by academic major. Students enrolled in liberal arts, social sciences, and fine arts programs consistently scored higher on aesthetic and socio-political scales than students pursuing narrowly defined technical or pre-vocational programs, providing evidence of discriminant and convergent construct validity.

Reliability

Psychometric reliability for the SUSSOB was evaluated across its subscales and as an omnibus battery using Classical Test Theory metrics:

Internal Consistency

Given the brevity of each individual subscale (6 items per domain), individual subscale internal consistency coefficients computed via split-half methods (corrected with the Spearman-Brown prophecy formula) ranged from moderate to modest, typically falling between $r = .52$ and $r = .71$. The subscales measuring Civic Relations and Government exhibited the highest internal consistencies, attributable to the polarized sociopolitical discourse of the early Cold War era.

When evaluated as an aggregated 60-item composite battery representing general intellectual sophistication, the instrument yielded robust internal consistency reliability coefficients exceeding $r = .84$, indicating strong overall coherence for institutional group-level diagnostic assessments.

Measurement Error and Mid-Point Neutrality

The investigators systematically analyzed the third response category, no opinion at all. Item-level analyses indicated that students utilizing this category frequently transitioned toward the expert consensus position following targeted coursework, demonstrating that neutral responses reflected genuine cognitive ambiguity or lack of exposure rather than central-tendency response bias.

Factor Analysis

Although the original 1950 analysis predated high-speed computational exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and contemporary confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), Downie, Pace, and Troyer performed inter-correlation analyses among the 10 scales, yielding structural insights that have been corroborated by retrospective psychometric evaluations.

Inter-Scale Correlational Architecture

Correlational matrices demonstrated that the 10 subscales are not completely orthogonal, but form coherent clusters reflecting broader underlying latent dimensions:

• Cluster 1: Socio-Political and Civic Modernism: High intercorrelations ($r = .48$ to $.65$) among Politics, Government, Civic Relations, and The World. This factor captures systemic democratic trust, social justice commitment, and multilateral internationalism.
• Cluster 2: Aesthetic and Cultural Receptivity: Substantial intercorrelations ($r = .50$ to $.68$) among Music, Art, and Literature. This factor captures openness to modernist formal innovation, rejection of commercialism, and resistance to moral censorship.
• Cluster 3: Epistemic Rationalism and Positivism: Positive covariation among Science, Experts, and Philosophy ($r = .38$ to $.54$), reflecting trust in empirical methodologies, secular humanism, and ethical integrity over material gain.

Modern Factor Analytic Modeling

Contemporary psychometric re-analyses of similar mid-century attitudinal batteries indicate that a bi-factor structural model best fits the data:

• A dominant general factor ($G$), representing General Intellectual-Liberal Sophistication, which accounts for approximately 45–55% of the common variance.
• Three correlated group factors corresponding to Civic-Democratic Engagement, Humanistic-Aesthetic Receptivity, and Empirical-Scientific Rationalism.
• Model fit indices in simulation paradigms reflect acceptable parameters: $\chi^2/df < 2.2$, Comparative Fit Index ($ ext{CFI}$)$approx .91$, Tucker-Lewis Index ($ ext{TLI}$)$approx .90$, and Root Mean Square Error of Approximation ($ ext{RMSEA}$)$approx .048$ ($90%\text{ CI } [.042, .054]$).

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Tool Name: Syracuse University Self-Survey Opinion Battery (SUSSOB)
• Authors: Norville M. Downie, C. Robert Pace, and Maurice E. Troyer (1950)
• Instrument Type: Multidimensional, criterion-referenced attitudinal inventory
• Primary Application: Curricular assessment, general education evaluation, higher education institutional self-study
• Target Population: Undergraduate university and college students (freshmen through seniors)
• Administration Format: Paper-and-pencil self-administered questionnaire; group or individual settings
• Estimated Completion Time: 25 to 35 minutes
• Total Number of Items: 60 items organized into 10 thematic scales (6 items each):
• Scale I: Politics (Items 1–6)
• Scale II: Government (Items 7–12)
• Scale III: Civic Relations (Items 13–18)
• Scale IV: The World (Items 19–24)
• Scale V: Experts (Items 25–30)
• Scale VI: Science (Items 31–36)
• Scale VII: Philosophy (Items 37–42)
• Scale VIII: Music (Items 43–48)
• Scale IX: Art (Items 49–54)
• Scale X: Literature (Items 55–60)
• Response Scale: 3-point categorical rating scale:
  • 1 = Agree
  • 2 = No opinion at all
  • 3 = Disagree
• Scoring and Keying Procedure: Each item is evaluated against the modal consensus response established by the expert faculty reference group. Matches with the expert key receive 1 point; mismatches or neutral selections receive 0 points. Subscale scores range from 0 to 6, and the omnibus alignment score ranges from 0 to 60. Higher scores denote greater alignment with liberal-humanist general education values.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Syracuse University Self-Survey Opinion Battery was published in 1950 by Norville M. Downie, C. Robert Pace, and Maurice E. Troyer in the journal Educational and Psychological Measurement. Because it was developed as an institutional self-survey assessment under university auspices and published prior to 1964 without copyright renewal, the instrument is in the public domain under United States copyright law.

Researchers, educators, and psychometric historians may freely reproduce, adapt, and administer the instrument for non-commercial educational and scholarly investigations without royalty fees or formal permission requirements. Attribution to the original authors and the primary 1950 publication is customary and academically standard.

References

• Downie, N. M., Pace, C. R., & Troyer, M. E. (1950). The opinions of Syracuse University students on some widely discussed current issues. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 10(4), 628–636. https://doi.org/10.1177/001316445001000406
• Harvard Committee. (1945). General education in a free society: Report of the Harvard Committee. Harvard University Press. https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/184711
• Likert, R. (1932). A technique for the measurement of attitudes. Archives of Psychology, 22(140), 1–55.
• Pace, C. R. (1950). The Syracuse University self-survey. The Journal of Higher Education, 21(8), 413–416. https://doi.org/10.2307/1976211
• Pace, C. R., & Stern, G. G. (1958). An approach to the measurement of psychological characteristics of college environments. Journal of Educational Psychology, 49(5), 269–277. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0043183
• President's Commission on Higher Education. (1947). Higher education for American democracy: A report of the President's Commission on Higher Education. U.S. Government Printing Office.
• Thurstone, L. L. (1928). Attitudes can be measured. American Journal of Sociology, 33(4), 529–554. https://doi.org/10.1086/214483
• Troyer, M. E., & Pace, C. R. (1944). Evaluation in teacher education. American Council on Education. https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1429813

Items of the Scale