Measuring the Motives of Political Actors at a Distance(Since these two sources have permitted members to revise and
extend their remarks before publication, and even to add additional
material, they are an imperfect record of what members actually said
on the floors of Congress, although they are a good record of the ver-
bal material that members wanted to disseminate.) The equivalent for
Great Britain, from the seventeenth century to the present, is
Hansard's Parliamentary Debates. For non-U.S. leaders, many verba-
tim texts of speeches and interviews are included in the Foreign
Broadcast Information Service Daily Report. This publication has gone
through several changes from its beginning in 1947 to the present:
from microfilm of mimeographed hard copy to microfiche of printed
hard copy; most recently (if not as comprehensively), on-line texts
have been available on the Internet. Other on-line sources, such as
Lexis-Nexis, are proliferating rapidly. Archival materials that
include verbatim texts from political leaders are also published (and
nowadays made available on-line) by many governments.
Preparation of Documents
Several steps can be taken to improve the objectivity of scoring. To
the maximum extent possible, scorers should be blind to the research
hypothesis and to the differences among the different documents
(sources, comparisons to be made, etc.). In some cases it may even be
appropriate to mask information that could identify the source or in
some other way bias the scoring, such as names of persons or coun-
tries, dates, and so forth. The entire set of material to be scored (for
example, the speeches of all candidates or the documents from both
war and nonwar crises) should be randomly mixed together to reduce
effects of serial position, scorer fatigue, and similar factors. (True
randomization can easily be carried out by assigning four- or five-
digit serial numbers from a table of random numbers and then sort-
ing the documents by serial number.)Scoring
The complete manual "Integrated System for Scoring Motives in
Running Text," together with instructions for learning, several dif-
ferent kinds of practice materials, expert scoring, and documenta-
tion, can be obtained at cost from the author.^5 The original versions