Rensis Likert - Likert in World War II

Likert in World War II

During World War II, Likert, as the Director of the Division of Program Surveys in the United States Department of Agriculture's Bureau of Agricultural Economics (B.A.E.), ran surveys first for U.S.D.A. but as the war progressed the Division ran surveys for many different governmental agencies including the Office of War Information, the U.S. Department of the Treasury, the Federal Reserve Board and in 1944-45, the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey. In 1944, he developed the first national geographic sampling frame. Likert, although not at a university at the time, was actively recruiting other social psychologists into his expanding government survey shop during the war. Likert was later asked to head a Surveys Division in the new U.S.D.A. Office of Facts and Figures. He turned this down to set up the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan. This became the Institute for Social research when Dorwin Cartwright moved the Center for Group Dynamics from MIT to the University of Michigan.

The Survey Division of the B.A.E. and the Polling Division, originally meant to work together, started to compete as competition arose for a tight budget. Each also differed in style of organizational management; Likert’s Survey Division was filled with academics and an academic culture, while the Polling Division was filled with a business-like culture. Because of differing values, each group thought they had a lot to teach the other group. The Polling Division was dominated by the use of closed questionnaires that could be easily processed and analyzed. Likert, on the other hand, advocated for open-ended questions, even though his famous Likert Scale is composed of closed-ended questions. In the Department of Agriculture, he inherited the open question style from professionals who were interviewing recruits. The open questions (or as Likert liked to call them: “fixed questions”) or the free answer technique differed from the Polling Divisions closed questions.