In 1924, as part of the nation’s most famous community study, Robert and Helen Lynd collected questionnaires from three-fourths of Middletown’s high school students, obtaining details on “the life of the high school population” from some 800 sophomore, junior, and senior students in English classes and reactions to various “statements of opinion” from 550 juniors and seniors in social science classes. Robert and Helen Lynd’s surveys of the opinions of Middletown (Muncie, Indiana) high school students combined the community survey tradition with the emerging specialties of educational testing and attitude measurement. Some of the findings were generalized to the entire community in an innovative application of student data to community ethnography. The Lynds interpreted the 1924 findings in the context of a Middletown experiencing rapid social change; secularization and modernization were eroding traditional ways, albeit at different rates in different institutional sectors. The attitude surveys were replicated in 1977, and again in 1989 and 1999. The present report traces 75-year trends in student attitudes as reflected by 17 original Lynd items for which there are numerical baseline data from 1924.
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Théodore Caplow (2004) studied this question.