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In
November 2001 we're going to celebrate
George Gallup's 100th anniversary.
The turning points of his life are being investigated and attempts to
assess his professional achievements are being made. The ideas put forward
by the author in his publication "George Gallup is our contemporary.
By
his 100th anniversary";
B. Doktorov
in "Telescope: observation of everyday life of St. Petersburg's
inhabitants"; 2000, ¹ 2 developed and specified. I'd like to give my
acknowledgement to John Hoagland. Gallup (Spring Grove, VA), Sharon Faye
Gallup (Moose Jaw, Sask, Canada), Valerie J. Ogren (Jefferson, Iowa, USA)
and Ernest Tani (NORC, USA) for valuable information about George Gallup
partly used in the present paper. It is also my duty and pleasure to thank
my colleagues and friends
Elena Bashkirova,
President of
ROMIR Group,
and professor
Gennadiy Batygin
for their support.
Introduction
The
name of George Gallup is known to hundreds of millions in all parts of the
world, but his contribution in the contemporary culture, politics and
science has been underestimated, or just unknown to many people. We
believe the reasons are multiple, but the main one is underestimation of
the importance of reliable empiric information for the society and for
social sciences. Consequently, the professional heritage of the researcher
who took pains over half a century to provide people with the most
adequate picture of the environment as perceived by them as well as to
provide social researchers with credible photos of public opinion and
tools of measurement is treated superficially.
In
spite of a growing understanding that the process of social cognition and
its effects are theoretic-empiric by nature, sociology is still regarded
primarily as a branch of social philosophy. Therefore, theoretical
assumptions and general conclusions, even if they have not been
substantiated by history, have a higher rating by "the scale of scientific
weight"; they are considered as more important and convincing than
theoretic-empiric ones or the ones based on measurements.
As
world democratic institutions develop and the role of social sciences
becomes more and more important, the actual value of the heritage left by
G. Gallup, researcher of the contemporary world, is sure to increase.
Sociology of the 19th century used to be descriptive, and methods of data
collection and analysis were treated as tools of cognition. The end of the
20th century made empiric methods in sociology vital for understanding of
social relationships; researchers came to realize that their
interpretations of social environment are nothing else, but one of the
functions of measuring techniques they used.
It
became possible because methodological problems rose by G. Gallup in the
course of public opinion studies and solutions found by him made
sociological techniques themselves the subject of research. It was also
thanks to him that US sociologists were the first to have an opportunity
to analyze the dynamic of public consciousness of an enormous country, and
the society was offered an opportunity of self-observation and
self-analysis.
Sometimes the outcome of research and life principles of researchers are
adopted (relatively) quickly by contemporaries, and researchers become
classics while they are still alive; their achievements are repeatedly
referred to by historians and methodologists. It depends, primarily but
not entirely, on how important discoveries and achievements are. It is
also important whether their behavior fits with established and widespread
perceptions about what research is like and what a researcher should look
like.
Other times it take long to understand that what a researcher has done is
of vital importance for the development of science, because both his
results and his research in general determine specific core elements that
can be comprehended and assessed only in the course of evolution of
science itself. I think G. Gallup whose 100th anniversary we're going to
celebrate in the fall of 2001 belongs to the second category of
researchers.
A
tenth-generation American
Genealogical investigations were one of G. Gallup's hobbies. It looks
quite reasonable, because it wouldn't have been natural if he had had no
interest in the roots of his kin. In 1902 the Gallup Family Association,
Inc. was formed, and by late 1980s it collected information about fifteen
generations of this large family. Gallup father's line was traced as far
back as to the first half of the 15th century. This is unusual even for
European clans that never left their native land. As to American ones,
this is quite extraordinary.
The
name "Gallup" originates from two German words: "Gott and Lobe", i.e. God
and Praising. Ancient papers say that in Lorraine, the area inhabited by
French and German people, there lived a family, Kollop by name, that moved
to England during the Norman Conquest.
John Gollop, born in the south of England in 1440, was the first to be
mentioned in papers. His great-grandson's grandson, John Gallop, born in
1590, set off to the New World on board the ship "Mary & John" in March
1630 and in 71 days, on May 30 that year they reached the American coast.
There are records saying about great respect contemporaries had for John
Gallop; his was practically the first to arrange in-shore trade between
Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut. Thus, an American branch of
the family started.
His
grandson, also John, born 16 years after migration to America, bore the
name of Gallup, and this spelling remained when George Gallup was born who
became a ten-generation American. We can easily assume that in his
childhood Gallup learned from his father family legends about how his
ancestors had opened up America and what severe hardships they had had to
live through in order to survive and become successful. Evidently, in his
early youth George Gallup felt his close links with the first
father-pilgrims.
It
was then that his perceptions about himself and life were shaped which are
so typical of real Americans, i.e. independence in thinking and behavior,
self-confidence, purposefulness, aggressiveness in business, fortitude and
optimism. A pioneer spirit of the first generations of Americans was
inherent to him; he was and will remain a pioneer in his professional
activity.
Gallup was not and could not be "just" a University researcher whose style
of research and system of social orientations had been shaped in Europe
over centuries and then got acclimatized successfully in America. We mean
reading lectures to students, detailed development of academic issues,
publications in journals, "solid" monographs, chairing commissions and
councils that are in charge of grants, speaking at scientific forums and
idle talks about nothing in professors' clubs. George Gallup knew how to
do all that and he did is quite successfully, but that was not enough for
him. His ideas about his own potential and abilities, his understanding of
the American history and reality, the system of American values, norms and
stereotypes shared by him forced him to search for a unique approach, to
shape his own view about the cause he found interesting, productive, and
necessary for his people and his country.
When Gallup was quite young and edited a student's newspaper in Iowa, he
said: "Be radical!" and professionally he was and will remain an
individual with a unique professional life. Encyclopedias and reference
books describe him as an author of perfect technology of public opinion
research; a statistician, a journalist and political analyst who had had
his fingers on the nations' pulse for decades, a businessman with a
strategic thinking who had formed a number of analytical and informational
agencies which are still successful in the US current highly competitive
business environment.
All
these are true, but they are only part of Gallup's heritage. We believe
Gallup is one of the most outstanding sociologists of the 20th century; it
is his merit that he applied an industrial way of data collection and
analysis to a combination of European and American sociological and
socio-psychological traditions of public opinion polls. In fact, he
suggested and then developed a technology of public opinion monitoring
that was adopted by many countries much later. He was also one of those
who radically changed the role of sociological information in the society;
the limits of traditional academic publications were too narrow for him,
so with a typically American push he used media for making findings of his
polls public. He considered public polls both conceptually and
organizationally as an element of mass information policy of any
democratic society. Gallup is a classic of public sociology and at the
same time, he valued the role of academic sociological research and
actively promoted its development.
For
over half a century Gallup monitored the American public consciousness
and, being skeptic about the hypothesis of cultural homogeneity of the
society, he gave a picture of a wide array of social reflexion and
behavior with the help of his probing. Therefore, not only the current
generation of American social researchers, but also next cohorts of
sociologists will have an opportunity to make a multi-aspect analysis of
social change. Such a heritage for America is unlikely to have been left
by an individual whose links with its history were looser and who was "not
so much of an American" than George Gallup.
Accumulation of knowledge and life experience
George Gallup was born on November 18, 1901 in the town of
Jefferson, county of
Greene, Iowa,
and he lived the first 36 years of his life in this state. The guide of
the county, published in the beginning of the 20th century, says that the
town was designed as a comfortable and nice place for business people and
professionals to live in, and that it was named after Thomas Jefferson,
the third US President. Jefferson became a town in 1872.
In
1918 a bronze statue to Abraham Lincoln, made in an old English style, was
erected in one of the main streets of the town. I think when Gallup grew
up and devoted his life to public opinion research, his thoughts
repeatedly returned to this monument and he often pondered over Lincoln's
words: "I want that what people wish to be done must be done, and a
problem I'm facing is to find out what it is they wish".
The
monument is in front of a beautiful building of the circuit court that had
been built a year before the monument. No doubt, those well-kept
architectural monuments convey specific features of the social geography
and epoch when George Gallup matured. The Gallup family's house built in
early 1900s in a very unusual style, in which George lived throughout his
school years until 1919, is still there.
George Gallup's parents - George Henry Gallup and Nettie Davenport - got
married in 1893, two years after George-father's first wife died and he
was left with a daughter aged a year and a half, Ruth by name. In 1894
George's sister Edna was born, in a year's time - another sister Gladys
and in late 1899 his brother John Edgar followed. Gallup Sr. dealt with
sales of real estate and was quite an original person. He spent much time
on elaboration of a new system of logic. When George Gallup was already
famous as a researcher of public opinion, at the ceremony of receiving the
highest award from the state of Iowa he recollected that after reading one
of his school papers his father had been the first to advise a career of
journalist to him. By early 20s prices for land dropped sharply and the
financial situation of the family with many children became quite
difficult.
George Gallup earned the money himself to pay for his education. During
his first college years at the
Iowa University
he opened a small business at the University swimming pool, and later on
he edited a University daily newspaper. He was so successful that upon
graduating from the college with a bachelor degree in journalism in 1923,
he was offered a job of University professor. Simultaneously he continued
his studies and in 1925 he became a master of psychology, and in 1928 he
became a doctor of journalism.
We
can see from Gallup's memoirs that he first dealt with polls as a method
of gathering information in 1923-1924 when he was working as an
interviewer for D'Arcy Advertising Agency in the town of Saint-Louis,
Missouri. Readers' perceptions about local press were explored. He was
greatly impressed with the technology of interviewing, and later on
perfection of interviewing methodology became the subject of his doctor's
paper. There is a legend saying that in 1925 Gallup conducted his first
survey: students from the campus were to name the prettiest girl. Ophelia
Miller, daughter of an editor from a small town of Washington, Iowa, won
this unusual beauty competition. Gallup married her on Christmas in 1925.
For
two years - from 1929 to 1931 - the hard years of the Great Depression,
George Gallup was head of journalism department at a private
Drake University
in Des Moines, the capital and the largest city in the state of Iowa. Then
he accepted an offer from the
Northwestern University
in the town of Evanston in the suburbs of Chicago, and he worked there as
a professor for a year. He gave lectures on journalism and advertising.
Thus, by the time he was thirty George Gallup had had quite a number of
accomplishments: he had completed his education and received the highest
academic credentials; he had had a long experience as a journalist and
editor; he was a successful professor and was frequently commissioned by
Des Moines Register &
Tribune,
The Cleveland Plain Dealer, and St. Louis Post-Dispatch to take
interviews; he had succeeded to develop efficient techniques for exploring
readers' interests and for interpreting findings. Thus, the Britannic says
that Des Moines Register & Tribune is still one of the most influential
regional editions in the USA. In many respects it became known thanks to
editorial cartoons drawn as a result of Gallup's polls. One of
biographical books says that it was Gallup who put forward an idea to talk
with respondents about their attitudes towards the newspaper,
preliminarily providing them with copies of the newspaper. And, finally,
in his doctor's paper "About unbiased methodology of exploring readers'
interest in the content of newspapers" Gallup pinpointed two main and
closely linked directions of his long and extremely productive academic
research. The first one is a study of political, social and economic
attitudes, and the second one - analysis and improvement of sociological
techniques.
It
was a remarkable start and we must say that many people who achieved as
much as Gallup would stop and make a traditional academic career. But,
possibly, the young provincial researcher had a hunch that everything he
had achieved was nothing else but a prelude to something more grandiose.
He probably understood that he needed to get out of the routine of small
towns and plunge into a more dynamic intellectual and business environment
in order to fulfill his vaguely realized potential. Deep in his heart he
was ready for a radical change in his life, so it occurred.
At
the beginning of 1930 George Gallup's publication appeared that summed up
his experience of exploring readership, and it attracted
Raymond Rubicam's
attention, one of the pioneers of current advertising industry and a
personality with a volcanic creative potential. He was President of
Young & Rubicam
then, with the main office located in New York, and he intended to open a
research center, the first one in advertising. It is hardly possible that
George Gallup was the only applicant for a job of the head of a
department, but preference was given to him. In 1932 Gallup who had two
sons by that time -
Alec
(born in 1928) and
George
(born in 1930) - moved to New York and started working on July 1. In 1937
one more child - his daughter Julia - was born.
Nowadays Young & Rubicam Inc. is one of the biggest American advertising
and communications agencies with 340 affiliates in 73 countries. But as
far back as in early 30s, when Gallup started to work with it, it had lots
of clients and was a leader in measuring audience of newspapers and radio.
R. Rubicam's business credo sounds simple: "Do your best to know about the
market more than your competitors, and pass this knowledge to writers and
artists who have imagination and deep respect for people".
Possibly, George Gallup with his unique creative abilities, with his
enormous industriousness and strive for understanding interests and needs
of people met the requirements best. Thanks to his research the agency
adopted an effective format of advertising messages, it also developed
special techniques for using comics in advertising, and later on it was
the first to use telephone interviews to measure audience of newspapers
and radio.
In
his turn, Gallup highly appreciated R. Rubicam's intellectual and business
abilities, and considered him as one of the leaders in advertising. R.
Rubicam helped Gallup to open his first and major institute, and later on,
in 1939, to set up the Audience Research Institute. His right hand was
another legendary (in future) specialist in advertising, an intelligent
and non-conformist Englishman
David Ogilvy.
In 1948 he opened his own agency -
Ogilvy & Mather,
that currently has 35 affiliates in the USA and over 350 ones in a hundred
of countries.
Undoubtedly, analysis in advertising and marketing where his competence
and experience as journalist and psychologist were needed and where he
could enrich his knowledge about methods of data collection and analysis
attracted Gallup. In one of his late interviews Gallup said that the main
goal of his life was public opinion research. But analysis of advertising
was of no lesser interest to him. He used to say: "I've been always fond
of advertising research ….and if I had to live a life all over again, I
wouldn't like it without advertising research".
In
1948 together with
Claude Robinson
he opened an agency
Gallup & Robinson,
Inc., dealing with advertising and market research, which is still
successful currently. No doubt, he would have achieved much, if he had
focused on advertising and communication. But several years after he
started working in this sphere, he changed his orientation and was guided
by another star.
An
hour of triumph. The main cause of his life
In
1932 Gallup conducted a poll among Iowa voters and predicted the victory
of his mother-in-law, Ola Miller, who was nominated from the Democratic
Party to run for secretary of the state. The prediction proved to be
correct, though it did not look credible first, because since the time of
the Civil War not a single democrat or a woman had ever been elected
secretary. It was one of the first political studies; however, we think it
would not have been so important either for Gallup's personal life or for
the history of public opinion research if Gallup had lived and worked as
professor in Iowa or Illinois.
But
the life in New York boiling up with events, regular meetings with
businessmen working with large companies in different states, analysis of
readership and radio programs, his activity as President of the Committee
on Market Research in 1934-1935, performance as visiting professor at
Pulitzer School of Journalism at Columbia University, New York, and many
other things broadened the former provincial's outlook and pushed him
forward to considering and analyzing national socio-political processes.
Together with his higher professional skills, deeper understanding of the
nature and technology of sampling, assimilation of experience while
working in Young & Rubicam, his success in predicting the outcome of
election in Iowa, they urged him to search for something new, something
that could synthesize the past and simultaneously open prospects in
future. He said: "I do have a system, but I don't know what to do with
it".
But
an energetic manager, Harold Anderson, turned up who was quick to assess
chances of the new informational business, and in 1935 those two persons
took a risk and opened
the American Institute of
Public Opinion
in Princeton, New Jersey. The term "Institute" was quite an exaggeration
at that time, because there was only a room with a desk, a telephone, and
a typewriter. Undoubtedly, only a risky and active individual could take
such a decision, but we'd like to stress that it was based on his
confidence in efficiency of the technology for collection and analysis of
sociological information that he had been using and developing. Gallup was
not at all reckless.
Every sociological textbook says how a young and little known researcher,
George Gallup, interviewed several thousand Americans across the country
during the presidential election campaign of 1936 and predicted the
re-election of Franklin Roosevelt, while Literary Digest, the edition that
had been surprising Americans with accurate forecasts over twenty years,
mailed 10 mln. questionnaires to owners of phones and cars, and after
analyzing 2 mln. responses mailed back, predicted his defeat at the
election.
I
won't go into detail and narrate the whole story, but I'd like to
emphasize what seems the most important to me. Another two researchers -
Archibald Crossley (1896-1985) and Elmo Roper (1900-1971), who used a
similar interviewing technology were also successful in predicting the
outcome of the election. Thus, the main thing is not that Gallup was the
only one who made the right prognosis and used the advanced methodology of
sampling (at the moment). But Gallup was the only one who said the
prediction of Literary Digest would be wrong a couple of months prior to
its poll. In mid June 1936 he mailed out 3000 postcards to some of
addresses used by the edition, and he believed that his small sample would
be representative of multimillion one used by the edition. Consequently,
he proved twice the effectiveness of correctly designed small samples: the
first one was representative of the American electorate, and the second
poll, a methodological one, was designed to test the sample used by
Literary Digest.
It
is important that Gallup made his statement about the wrong methodological
approach used by Literary Digest public, by publishing it on July 12, 1936
in a number of newspapers. So he turned his probing of public opinion into
a social and public phenomenon, that had never been done previously.
The
analysis of Gallup's biography allows us to assume that his more
aggressive behavior than that of Crossley or Roper was not at all a result
of his greater ambitions or, even less probably, of a former provincial's
ingeniousness. I believe there are several reasons. First, it's American
offensiveness; second - professional understanding of the role of the
press; and third - experience gained from his advertising effectiveness
research. But all those reasons are minor ones. The main one is that
unlike his colleagues, he was more energetic and more motivated to measure
public opinion. Possibly, he started to regard himself as "an apostle of
democracy" then.
Later Gallup wrote that he hadn't run a great risk by describing the
Literary Digest's prediction as wrong. But this was not quite true. He
borrowed the money needed for his poll from the editorial board as money
back guarantee, and he understood well that if his forecast did not prove
to be correct, he would lose his business. But everything turned out to be
all right and his Institute did not close down.
The
name of Roosevelt appeared to be quite fortunate for George Gallup.
Following his nurse example, his family and friends called him Ted in
honor of the 26th US President - Theodore Roosevelt, who led the country
in 1901-1909. In its turn, Franklin Roosevelt's victory at the election of
1936 made Gallup nation-famous. His prediction and the situation at the
moment became an hour of triumph in the life of Gallup, and one of the
most important events in the history of interviewing methodology.
F.
Roosevelt was re-elected President twice: in 1940 and 1944, and both times
Gallup's predictions were impeccable. In 1940 the error was less than 3%,
and in 1944 -a bit more than 2%. But his "easy" and triumphant advancement
was stopped in 1948, when George Gallup, as well as A. Crossley and E.
Roper, predicted a defeat of Harry Truman, but he won. For all of them
that was a real shock.
Even 50 years after that the children of classics of public opinion
research, who are experienced pollsters themselves, remembered what a
severe shock it had been for their fathers. In 1998 Crossley's daughter
remembered how tense the family atmosphere had been because her father had
watched Truman's activity and growing public support. Roper's son said it
had looked like the end of the world. Both he and his father had voted for
Truman and realized that he would win, but the prediction had already been
published, so their agency would have to live through hard times. Besides,
the election was held a week after his brother's suicide. Gallup's son,
George Gallup Jr., remembered that after the election 30 newspapers
cancelled their subscription to interviewing results, and his father had
to convince many of them to continue cooperation.
This fiasko-48 shows how difficult it is to be the first. Nowadays it is
common knowledge that electoral attitudes are flexible and subject to the
influence of mass media; that published ratings can be used as a tool to
manipulate public consciousness; that it is important to have information
not only about voters who have made their choice, but about those who are
uncertain as well; that it is necessary to know exactly how many potential
voters will go to ballot boxes and how many won't; that polls should be
conducted on a regular basis and the more frequently, the closer the
election date is; etc. All these sound elementary like a truism, but no
one can imagine what it was worth to write this pollster ABC. And the
pioneers of public opinion research paid dearly for it.
The
logic of science development and stochastic nature of results obtained
from polls allows us to conclude that sooner or later something like the
fiasko-48 was doomed to happen. The comment made by
Warren Mitofsky,
a well-known American public opinion researcher, that "Those dealing with
polls must be modest. Every time self-confidence turns into a defeat",
pinpoints another reason for what happened. The success of three polls
could not but deaden researchers' attention to the nature of phenomenon
under examination and to the technology of data collection. Erroneous
predictions of the outcome of national elections occurred later and in
many countries, but fortunately, they were experienced specialists and
strong personalities who faced the first "trouble" in the new technology
and they were able to calmly analyze the causes of the failure and make
serious and far-sighted conclusions.
It
would be natural to ask what effect the events of 1948 had on Gallup's
further research activities and on the activity of his Institute? What
would have happened, if there had been no crisis? We are confident that in
any case Gallup would not have given up public opinion research, because
it had become not only his occupation, but part of political philosophy as
well.
But
the researcher could have devoted most of his time to the study of public
opinion phenomenology. Or he could have accepted an offer from some
University and read lectures to students and simultaneously conducted
polls. Yet, I believe that after what had happened, Gallup came to realize
that public opinion measuring was the cause of his life. The first three
successful predictions of the outcome of presidential elections showed
that he was on the right way, but the fourth failure meant that the
technology of measuring needed amendments after thorough examination and
correction. Possibly, he also understood that he had to do his best to
exclude failures not only from his personal practice, but on a large scale
as well.
It
would be fair to assume that the underlying reason for G. Gallup's worries
and alarm was his concern that serious mistakes in public opinion research
could lead to decreasing public interest in polls. In its turn, it could
have a negative effect on the development of every democratic institution
in the USA, and that, to his mind, could pose a threat to the whole
American political system. He repeatedly cited and tried to implement the
ideas of
James Bryce,
an English writer and diplomat living at the end of the 19th - beginning
of the 20th century, a very well educated person and one of the founders
of the League of Nations. Lord Bryce believed that no democracy would be
possible until the problem of public opinion measuring was solved. At the
same time, he regretted that "a device for weighting or measuring public
will from week to week and from month to month was unlikely to be
invented".
Obviously, in late 40s, given the specific historic setup, Gallup closely
linked the development of American democracy with reliable information
about the state of the society and dynamic of public opinion being
available for general public. He remembered that his victory in 1936
caused a closedown of Literary Digest and he could not but realize that
another erroneous prediction would be deadly for his cause and hold back a
further development of public opinion research. But he could see that
ordinary Americans were pleased that their opinions were needed and of
interest. Thus, during the poll about the third term of presidential
office for Roosevelt an Arkansas farmer was surprised but pleased: "Are
you asking me? Will they consider my opinion?"
So,
improvement of public opinion measuring technology and making their
findings public became of utmost importance for George Gallup. The system
of polls and information analysis designed by him has been working for
over 50 years without any serious troubles. Since 1948 Americans elected
President 12 times, and 12 times the predictions made by the Gallup
Institute were the right ones.
Heritage for the XXI century
Sociology is a young science, and as it develops, everything that has been
done is likely to be revised and re-estimated. The importance of many
principles, concepts, theories, conclusions is likely to be specified, so
some of them will be renewed and updated and will remain effective in the
new century, while others, after having been used, will belong to the
past. The fate of their authors will be similar.
Naturally, this applies to empiric information too: some of it is likely
to be actively cited by researchers of the next generation. And some
information will be used as a basis for analysis of dynamic of social
processes after additional interpretation. But much of it will not be used
even for drawing a social historic picture due to new, higher quality
standards of empiric information.
In
the old science of physics there is a conventional division into
theoreticians and experimenters. Bot of them make a contribution in the
science and it is well known that such experimenters as M.
Faraday,
A. Michelson
or
P.
Cherenkov
are prominent physicists. In sociology there are also theoreticians (if
the definition of sociological theory is made clearer), but there are no
experimenters. The thing is that to give explanations about the society
and its mechanisms is the most important task of sociology, but any
experiments with the society are beyond its competence.
At
the same time, there are sociologists who see their goal in providing the
science with high quality empiric information and reliable measuring
techniques. It is too early to say what sociology of the XXI century will
be like, but most probably it will be more theoretical, i.e. links between
logic and empiric aspects will become closer and more harmonious, and more
advanced measuring techniques will be available. Consequently, the role
and functions of specialists who currently obtain empiric information and
simultaneously develop sociological techniques is likely to be revised.
Overall, the importance of their work will increase.
George Gallup deserves to be regarded as a pioneer in this field of
sociology and as a researcher who made an enormous initial contribution.
This is his main heritage, the one he left to sociologists of the new
century. And below we're going to explain what we mean. His heritage
cannot be divided, and it's absurd to split it into separate pieces and
rank them by importance or value. But we'd like to start with stressing
that George Gallup was the first to design an effectively working system
of public opinion measuring and data collection, and defined its role for
American democracy. Half a year after Lord Bryce’s regretful comment,
Gallup could have stated that a device for measuring public moods was
invented, namely polls. Those who came after Gallup and formed new
analytical empires, e.g.,
Louis Harris
and
Daniel Yankelovich,
failed to come up with any significant improvements.
The
amounts of information collected by the Gallup Institute since 1935 is
impossible to measure. The information describes Americans' attitudes
practically to every aspect of social life and reflects trends in values,
attitudes and needs of several generations; it shows how citizens changed,
how they reacted to developments within and outside the country in the
second half of the XX century. Are there sociologists in any other country
who posses such archives of data?
In
fact, Gallup's long research laid the foundations of the sociology of
social processes. Prior to that sociologists could use only dynamic of
economic and demographic statistics or comparative historic observations
and generalizations. Gallup was the first to conduct a monitoring of
socio-cultural aspects of social life, and thus, he opened an epoch of
accumulation and analysis of statistics of public consciousness trends. As
a result, sociology, of course, became more "rigid"; some of its links
with social philosophy, cultural anthropology and history were cut off.
But, first, every science becomes stronger as its territory is better
demarcated. Second, the building of sociology is still being erected, and
in the new century new bridges will be built between sociology and other
social sciences.
In
1935 Gallup invited a young Englishman, Harry Field, to work for Young &
Rubicam, later on G. Field worked in his Institute. In 1939 Gallup
entrusted him with the formation of the British Institute of Public
Opinion - the first overseas affiliate of the Gallup Institute. In 1941
with the support of Gallup, Crossley and Roper H. Field opened the
National Opinion Research
Center
(NORC) - a non-profitable research organization with the main goal of
improving the practice of polls. Respective objectives were also set: to
investigate methods of interviewing, to improve technology, to develop and
perfect interviewing techniques and support effective programs of data
analysis. When NORC was just formed and later on outstanding researchers
whose names are connected with the development of interviewing methods and
contemporary sociology in general worked for it. Here are some of the
names: Norman Bradburn, William Cruskal, Hadley Cantril, Paul Lasarsfeld,
Gordon Allport, Samuel Stouffer, Herbert Hayman and others.
It
was under the aegis of NORC that all links of a measuring chain, beginning
with development of questionnaires and ending with interpretation of
findings, were systematically studied. Thus, George Gallup gave an impulse
to the methodology of total analysis of measurement quality. We can hardly
disagree with Sarah Van Allen's opinion, who used to work with Gallup and
who wrote: "Gallup's talent and contribution are that he knew what to
measure, how to measure and how to interpret results".
Needs for monitoring public consciousness and practice of developing new
methodological techniques of measuring led to a different approach to the
role of measuring tools in social cognition. In fact, for Gallup
sociological tools were not so much a kind of social thermometer or a
stethoscope to be used when needed, as an object to be specially studied
and continuously perfected.
When George Gallup is spoken about as a statistician, his contribution to
the development of samples representative of the American population and
procedures of practical implementation of theoretically designed samples
are meant. He was actually a pioneer in this field, and his experience as
well as criticism of his sample designs served as a starting point for
development and use of sampling methods in sociology. However, we'd like
to stress another Gallup's contribution to statistical analysis the
importance of which is yet, unfortunately, underestimated.
Mathematical formulae show quantity of respondents to be interviewed for
this or that sample design in order to achieve an "a priori" selected
degree of accuracy. But mathematics is unable to say - it's beyond its
competence - what degree of accuracy is actually needed for the society;
this is a task to be solved by the society itself. At the same time, if
the society admits the existence of such a problem, it is unable to
present its "wishes" in terms of quantity. So this is an exclusive circle,
and a way out can be found only in practice.
By
his long practice of probing electoral attitudes George Gallup
demonstrated - the word "proved" would be wrong here - that accuracy
achieved by interviewing adequately selected 1000-3000 respondents was
sufficient to make correct predictions of electoral behavior of the
population of an enormous country. Even today there is certain distrust in
small samples for public polls, but in 30s - 50s pollsters had to take
great efforts to uphold their interviewing technology. The actual practice
could have set a different standard of accuracy (at least for a short
while) - much higher one. It would have meant that the society as a single
social unit had been provided with redundant information paid by the
society, but not used by it.
A
lack of a different field of social relations (maybe, only marketing, to a
certain extent) in which one could check accuracy of sociological
measurements makes election polls a kind of laboratory for testing
sociological measuring techniques and methods. Gallup used to say: "It is
actually a fine field for research and experimenting, because after the
election date you know how right you were with the accuracy to the last
symbol". He understood this currently established metrological fact
earlier than anybody else, and took much effort to turn election polls
into a testing area for improving interviewing methodology. His
understanding of certain universals in the chain of sociological
measurement made him confident that instrumental and technological
solutions discovered in the course of election polls could be used to
explore a wider range of socio-cultural indicators.
Therefore, a focus was also made on post-election polls that allowed the
evaluation of quality of numerous elements of measuring. The initial
logical premises of Gallup's interviewing procedure are simple and based
on two provisions. They are to ensure that that every member of the
general universe should have an equal chance to be interviewed and to
minimize the influence of external factors (beginning with the wording of
questions and ending with a setup when an interview takes place) on
respondent's responses. At the same time, it took almost seventy years to
outline how to realize this scheme in the 21st century. We mean
InterSurvey
methodology of on-line interviewing developed by
Norman Nie
who has been working in NORC for years.
Since the first public polls conducted by Gallup, their findings were open
to mass media and researchers. As he understood well how important for
science and education systematic and proper accumulation and storage of
polls' records were, Gallup and Roper formed
the Roper Center
in 1946, the center which is currently the largest collection of public
polls. The Center contains complete files of over 10 000 polls conducted
from mid 1930s, and thousands of reports on other surveys.
Thus, the contemporary sociology cannot be conceived without George
Gallup's heritage. But at the same time, we cannot afford to leave
everything that Gallup did in the building of the 20th century and proceed
"without luggage". The punishment for such light-mindedness will follow
immediately, because any sensible advancement in an extremely
sophisticated social space requires perfect sailing directions and
reliable measuring techniques.
George Gallup died on July 26, 1984 in a small village of Tsingel on the
shore of the Tan Lake near Bern, and he was buried in Princeton. The man's
life came to an end, but what he did is still alive. The motto engraved on
G. Gallup and his wife's tombstone says: "Be
Bolde. Be wyse";
it is part of the Gallup clan's coat of arms. Members of this large family
have been observing the motto for several centuries; so did G. Gallup.
Gallup's sons continued the cause begun by their father, and they have
been conducting polls for many years and headed analytical centers formed
by their father.
But
George Gallup formed another family too - a global community of pollsters.
Research agencies in 20 countries of the world responsible for 70% of GNP
are members of the Gallup Organization. As far back as before the World
War II research centers to probe public opinion, to explore quality of
life, communication and economic behavior of the population were formed in
a number of countries. In May 1947 they united and formed an international
research network -
Gallup International
Association,
and G. Gallup was its first President. Today the association unites 55
research agencies from all parts of the world; Elena Bashkirova, President
of ROMIR Group, represents Russia.
In
the book describing a genealogical tree of the Gallup family every family
member has an ID consisting of two parts. The first part is number of the
generation, and the second one - individual's number. John Gollop, the
family's patriarch, has the shortest number: 1-1. The first pages of the
book about a global family of pollsters are still being written, but one
thing is already known. Number 1-1 in this family belongs to George
Gallup. I wish the key words in the motto of this family were also
"courage and fortitude".
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