Public opinion polling has a long pedigree, and wars, politics, business, and humanitarianism have all been incentives to its development. Its ancestry includes philosophers and social scientists who contributed to the definition of public opinion, which had to be conceptualized before it could be measured. Landowners and social reformers are among those who worked on the methods of social surveys. Journalists, psychologists, and sociologists contributed to the fashioning of questionnaires. Sampling theory was developed by astronomers, mathematicians, and economists, while the methods of data analysis were devised by statisticians, psychologists, and sociologists. All this, when coupled with modern technology, makes polling an indispensable tool of politics, business, and the mass media today.
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References
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1. For a discussion of publics and their conceptualization in history, see L. John Martin, “The Moving Target: General Trends in Audience Composition,” in Propaganda and Communication in World History, ed. Harold D. Lasswell, Daniel Lerner, and Hans Speier (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1980), 3:249-294.
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2. James Bryce, The American Commonwealth (London: Macmillan, 1889), 217-219.
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3. A Lawrence Lowell, Public Opinion and Popular Government (New York: Longmans, Green, 1913), pp. 4-14.
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4. Bryce, American Commonwealth, p. 221.
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5. See Herbert Blumer, “The Mass, the Public and Public Opinion,” in Reader in Public Opinion and Communication, 2nd ed., ed. Bernard Berelson and Morris Janowitz (New York: Free Press, 1966), p. 46.
6.
6. Pollsters occasionally violate this requirement, posing questions that are not an issue but are put to the respondent for the first time by the interviewer. See articles by Michael Margolis, Kurt and Gladys Engel Lang, and Kenneth P. Adler in this volume of The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.
7.
7. For an overview of the early history of social surveys, see International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 1st ed., s.v. “Social Research, The Early History of”; also compare Daniel Lerner, The Human Meaning of the Social Sciences (Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1959), p. 48; Catherine Marsh, The Survey Method (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1982), p. 12.
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8. See Henry Mayhew, Mayhew's London (London: Spring Books, n.d.). This is a recently reprinted edition of an 1861 abridgment of three of Mayhew's four volumes.
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9. Compulsory education had recently been introduced in Britain under the Education Act of 1870.
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10. International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, s.v. “Sociology: The Early History of Social Research”; also Mildred Parten, Surveys, Polls and Samples (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950), pp. 5-8.
11.
11. For a discussion of these early surveys, see George Gallup and Saul Forbes Rae, The Pulse of Democracy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1940), chap. 3.
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12. See Gordon W. Allport, “The Historical Background of Modern Social Psychology,” in The Handbook of Social Psychology, 2nd ed., ed. Gardner Lindzey and Elliot Aronson (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1968), 1:59-69.
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13. International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, s.v. “Adolphe Quetelet.”
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14. Ibid.
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15. International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, s.v. “Sociology: The Early History of Social Research.”
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16. Gallup and Rae, Pulse of Democracy, p. 36.
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17. See International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, s.v. “L. L. Thurstone”; also L. L. Thurstone, “Attitudes Can Be Measured,” in Readings in Attitude Theory and Measurement, ed. Martin Fishbein (New York: John Wiley 1967), pp. 77-89.
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18. Rensis Likert, “A Technique for the Measurement of Attitudes,”Archives of Psychology, no. 140, p. 44 (1932).
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19. Marsh, Survey Method, pp. 25-26.
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20. Richard W. Boyd with Herbert H. Hyman, “Survey Research,” in Handbook of Political Science, ed. Frederick I. Greenstein and Nelson Polsby (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1975), 7:271.
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21. Lerner, Human Meaning, p. 52.
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22. [L. John Martin], “Survey Research and Opinion Polls,” in Only One Science, Twelfth Board Report of the National Science Board (Washington, DC: National Science Foundation, 1981), p. 97.
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23. A. L. Bowley, “The Application of Sampling to Economic and Sociological Problems,”Journal of the American Statistical Association, 31:475 (1936).
24.
24. Ibid, pp. 475-76.
25.
25. Much of this history of the development of probability and sampling theory was drawn from the individual biographies of the scientists in the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences; see also Martin, “Survey Research and Opinion Polls”; J. P. Guilford, Psychometric Methods (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1954), pp. 2-3; Boris Parl, Basic Statistics (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967), p. 2; B. V. Guedenko and A. Ya. Khinchin, An Elementary Introduction to the Theory of Probability, trans, Leo F. Boron (New York: Dover, 1962), p. 118.
26.
26. See Gallup and Rae, Pulse of Democracy, pp. 39-43.
27.
27. Lerner, Human Meaning, pp. 48-49, 56.
28.
28. Charles Y. Glock, Survey Research in the Social Sciences (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1967), pp. xiv, 21.
29.
29. John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic... Scientific Investigation (London: Longmans, 1843).
