Наша короткая переписка с профессором Стивеном Чаффии (Steven H. Chaffee, 1936-2001) состоялась за несколько месяцев до его смерти. Он был одним из крупнейших американских специалистов в области изучения массовой коммуникации, политических наук, истории журналистики и смежных вопросах. Им опубликовано огромное число статей в ведущих американских журналах, около тридцати книг, последние из которых: Steven H. Chaffee (1991).

Communication Concepts 1: Explication. Newbury Park CA: Publications; Everett Rogers & Steven Chaffee (1994). Communication and Journalism from Daddy Bleyer to Wilbur Schramm: A Palimpsest. Journalism Monographs No. 148, December; Zhongdang Pan, Steven Chaffee, Godwin Chu & Yanan Ju (1994). To See Ourselves: Comparing Traditional Chinese and American Cultural Values, Boulder, CO: Westview Press; Wilbur Schramm (1997).

The Beginnings of Communication Study in America: A Personal Memoir. Ed. Steven H. Chaffee & Everett M. Rogers. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications; Brenda Dervin & Steven Chaffee (Eds.) (forthcoming). Communication, a Different Kind of Horse Race: Essays Honoring Richard F. Carter. Hampton Press.

Он преподавал во многих университетах Америки, в том числе - с 1981 по 1999 годы в Stanford University, возглавлял множество научных структур и проектов, выступал с докладами на различных форумах. Профессор Стивен Чаффии имел научные награды от многих обществ и университетов.

Профессор Стивен Чаффии был первым из американсикх ученых, поддержавших наше стремление собрать на одном сайте работы о Гэллапе. В частности он любезно предоставил нам возможность его статью, в которой рассматривается творчество двух пионеров исследования аудитории средств массовой коммуникации - Джорджа Гэллапа и Ралфа Нафзигера.

Abstract.  In keeping with end-of-century biographies of great leaders, this essay traces the careers of opinion pollster George Gallup and journalism educator Ralph Nafziger. They inadvertently overlapped in 1930, by publishing the first Journalism Quarterly articles on newspaper readers. Gallup became internationally recognized as creator of the Gallup Poll and other media audience enterprises. He invented some standard questions that are used in academic as well as commercial research today, and "a new form of journalism" built around public opinion on current events. Nafziger, as a professor and administrator, built research centers and graduate programs in two leading journalism schools. He was central to establishment of research as an integral component within education for journalism and mass communication.

Empirical mass communication research departs from other scholarly traditions with its close examination of media audiences.  Our self-imposed burden, before we venture conclusions about people’s motives, attention, or reactions toward mass media content, is to gather evidence on these processes.  When we do, we are following a path that was broken for us by George H. (“Ted”) Gallup of Iowa (1901-1984) and Ralph O. Nafziger of Wisconsin (1896-1973). 

In 1930 these two men -- unlikely to be remembered together otherwise -- introduced audience research into education for journalism by publishing two newspaper “reader-interest” field surveys of community residents (Gallup, 1930; Nafziger, 1930).  While both authors circumspectly avoided tables of numbers, their methodology represented a sharp departure for Journalism Quarterly, a journal that had in its first six years published teaching materials, musings on journalism as a profession, plus some occasional legal and historical scholarship. I have chosen to devote my turn in this forum to these two pioneering authors, because they had a formative influence on mass communication research as we practice it today.  Their divergent careers offer very different role models, each estimable by its own lights, and a sense of our intellectual legacy. In telling these parallel stories, I will also note contributions of a few other leading social scientists, media professionals, and mass communication scholars of their era.  I think of this essay as a matter of paying my respects.

The Original Studies

In 1930, Gallup, a graduate of the University of Iowa’s first journalism class who had gone on to a Ph.D. in applied psychology, was in his second year of teaching journalism at Drake University.  Nafziger, a World War I Army combat veteran with seven years newspaper experience, was also teaching journalism, while working on a Ph.D. in political science at the University of Wisconsin. These two innovators were to become great institution-builders in their respective spheres in the coming decades.  Gallup literally created several commercial professions of mass communication, and Nafziger did somewhat the same thing, if less famously, within academics. 

The two articles contained several hints of the very different futures that were in store for these two sons of the prairie. Gallup’s, which appeared first, was a methodological piece.  He described his data collection procedure of an interviewer sitting down with the previous day’s local newspaper and asking patiently how much of each item a person had read.  His interviewers also asked whether the reader had liked or disliked each article. Gallup pointed his report toward management, arguing that his procedure produced much sounder information for editorial decisions than did such passive indicators as complaints, letters to the editor, circulation, or overheard conversations about the newspaper.  His article said little about sampling or the communities his samples represented.  Having completed surveys in a number of small Iowa towns, he offered summary conclusions about the newspaper in general, stressing soft news and features such as comics, which his interviews indicated were a major consideration “when a reader buys one newspaper rather than another.”

Nafziger, although his research was not dissimilar, was trying to get facts about a particular community, Madison, Wisconsin.  The care he took in sampling followed his descriptive, journalistic approach to society.  He was scrupulous about interviewing in every precinct of the city (stratifying for income), and proudly reported a response rate of 40 to 50 percent for his mailed questionnaire.  Nafziger’s questions were a bit more generic than Gallup’s sit-down interview, even though his conclusions were more particularistic.  In Madison, interviewers at the doorstep handed each respondent a list of regular features of the newspaper,[iii] with instructions such as, “check comic strips you read.”   Gallup’s interviewers would instead point to a specific strip on a particular day, implicitly assuming that generalization would be achieved by cumulating many readers’ self-reports across a representative sample of days.

Like Gallup, Nafziger addressed his conclusions partly to management, which he was pleased to report had made several content changes based on his findings.  But he also chided the editorial side of the paper (and, in passing, of all newspapers) for not keeping up with their own advertising and circulation departments in use of new survey research techniques.  Early on, then, we see Gallup approaching the newspaper as a problem in product design for the mass market, while Nafziger was thinking about it as a work institution, and its readership as reflecting a community in which he felt a personal stake.

“Gallup had a better questionnaire,” Nafziger would recall later, “but we had a better sample.”[iv] This pithy contrast was prophetic, especially for Gallup, a master of the Middle-American vernacular who quickly established a national reputation in the polling industry through his keen sense of how to ask questions that people understood.  Gallup developed what became the classic methods media industries use in their planning, and several of his standard opinion questions are to this day asked the way he drafted them.  Gallup’s sampling shortcuts, which were obvious to Nafziger if not to others, would not catch up with him for nearly two decades.

Early Careers

In 1931-32 Gallup moved to Northwestern University, to teach advertising.  After that year he left academics for the advertising industry itself, creating at Young & Rubicam in New York City the first ad agency research on radio’s impact upon consumers.  Before leaving Iowa, though, he ran polls to support his mother-in-law’s successful 1932 campaign for state office; this was his first and only foray into partisan politics.[v] His Gallup Poll, a side business at the time, made news in 1934 by successfully predicting that the Democrats would, contrary to expectations for an off-year election, gain seats in the House of Representatives even though they already held the White House.  Two years later he (along with Elmo Roper and other survey exponents) won further recognition by predicting the landslide re-election victory of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.  Y&R indulged him in building his own polling business, which added value to their commercial advice to clients; the advertising firm made him a vice president in 1937, and he remained with them at least part‑time for another ten years.

Meanwhile, Nafziger left Madison (A.B.D.) in 1935 to become an associate professor of journalism at the University of Minnesota.  His dissertation, completed the following year, concerned the press and public opinion during what was then called, simply, “the World War.” Nafziger and the director of the Minnesota school, Ralph D. Casey, had been students together at Wisconsin, in the seminar where Professor Willard G. Bleyer prepared Ph.D. candidates in social science fields for their Journalism Minor.  Under Casey (a former Seattle Post-Intelligencer city editor who held a Phi Beta Kappa key), Nafziger became a standout on the all-star journalism faculty Minnesota assembled during the Great Depression.  In 1937 he was promoted to professor, and in 1941 won election as president of the American Association of Teachers of Journalism.[vi]

Nafziger and a third alumnus of Bleyer’s Wisconsin seminar, Chilton (“Chick”) Bush of Stanford University, developed quantitative content analysis as a method of newspaper study alongside audience studies.  (Content analysis became a more widespread form of scholarship in journalism schools than audience analysis.)  Nafziger conducted comparative studies of newspapers, and in 1940 published an annotated bibliography on international journalism.  Thus prepared, he scheduled a sabbatical leave to study the foreign press, for the academic year 1941-42. 

War and Innovation

Nafziger was just getting started on his research at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., in December, 1941, when the bombing of Pearl Harbor abruptly ended his sabbatical.  He volunteered to move his work over to the new Office of Facts and Figures,[vii] where he began concentrating on the German press as part of the Allied counteroffensive against Nazi propaganda.  This work brought him into contact with some of the most famous social scientists of the time, including some who were studying mass media in other ways.  One was political scientist Harold D. Lasswell, considered the leading authority on propaganda analysis and a strong advocate of quantitative methods (Lasswell, 1950); Lasswell advised on the content analyses Nafziger was doing, and on the design of Allied propaganda as well.  Another wartime government consultant Nafziger met was Paul F. Lazarsfeld of Columbia University, whose Office of Radio Research contracted with the Columbia Broadcasting System to do audience studies (Lazarsfeld & Kendall, 1948).  Nafziger’s erstwhile statistics professor, Samuel Stouffer, had relocated to Washington, on leave from Harvard University, to head up the Army’s American Soldier studies that included innovative field experiments on troop “orientation” films (Hovland, Lumsdaine & Sheffield, 1949).

Also in the nation’s capital to help at OFF was Wilbur Schramm, a University of Iowa professor of literature and creative writing.  Nafziger and Schramm, whose paths would often cross professionally after the war, took note of the way the entrepreneurial Lazarsfeld ran a collaborative media-university research shop.  When their work at OFF was downsized in 1943, Nafziger and Schramm repaired to their home universities with expanded visions.  At Minnesota, Nafziger established the first journalism school research center, built around audience studies.  Soon after being appointed director of the journalism school at Iowa, Schramm followed Nafziger’s example, adding to his audience research center the first Ph.D. program in mass communication.[viii] It was in this way that Gallup’s home institution eventually built upon the approach to research he had introduced there as a graduate student some two decades earlier.

As the Depression ended and the war began, Gallup had ideas of his own. He hit upon the idea of selling to newspapers a column under his byline (originally called “America Speaks”) based on what survey data showed people were thinking about current issues. He called this, not hyperbolically, “a new form of journalism.”  Gallup was not literally the inventor of opinion surveys, but the phrase “Gallup poll” became eponymic and he was often treated as the spokesman for the industry.  He established similar survey research firms in Great Britain, Canada, Australia, and Sweden by 1940, and at the end of the war in 1945 newspapers in all four countries were subscribing to his columns (Gallup, 1942).

Eventually Gallup’s news releases were run as conventional articles with their own headlines, over Gallup’s byline. In the 1930s he moved his survey research headquarters, which he called the American Institute of Public Opinion (AIPO), to Princeton, New Jersey.  (The marketing office remained in New York City.)  The firm’s survey questionnaires consisted mostly of commercial marketing research, which kept the ledgers balanced.  AIPO itself often showed an operating loss (despite many subscribing newspapers) but the Poll’s publicity was effective advertising for Gallup’s other businesses.

AIPO reported opinions on such varied topics as religion, alcoholism, and attitudes toward women, but politics was always a mainstay.  Gallup was the first to ask people to rate "the job the president is doing," a question that became a standard by which journalists and historians judge presidential performance. In time, presidential job ratings even became a kind of political capital; a U.S. President can get his way with Congress much more readily if he stands high in “the polls.” 

Gallup also began asking what people thought was “the most important problem” facing the country, thereby earning the gratitude of future generations of agenda-setting scholars.  He recognized the value of keeping question wording constant over the years so that results could later be utilized by historians in search of reliable indicators of shifting American social values.

Another Gallup business was the Audience Research Institute (ARI), which he created for radio and motion picture clients.  One of his methodological innovations was the "coincidental" method of measuring the radio audience, by contacting people at home and asking what they were listening to at the moment.  In the film industry, one of ARI’s first contracts was with the Selznick Organization, on the marketing campaign for Gone With The Wind.  Based on audience comments collected after a sneak preview in a California town, Gallup advised them to sell it as a love story, not a war movie.  Thus promoted, it became the most profitable film of its era.

In the 1940s, ARI survey results led to modified movie titles, promotion strategies, casting, and plotlines -- leading writers and actors to complain about Gallup's artless advice.  To "do an ARI" became Hollywood talk for any sort of market‑testing, and Gallup was often blamed for the notorious sugar-coated “Hollywood endings” that were imposed on novels and plays over the protests of their authors.  Producers, though, capitalized on Gallup’s reputation for “scientific methods” to reassure potential investors who might be wary of business judgment in flaky, scandal-ridden Hollywood.

Challenge and Response

For all his skills at writing questions, formatting interviews, and forming new businesses, Gallup’s basic sampling method in the 1940s remained crude by scientific standards.  Instead of random selection he relied on "barometer counties" and quota sampling methods, procedures that are cited in today’s textbooks as “how not to do it.”  To hold down field costs, for example, Gallup interviewers did not make “call-backs,” i.e., a second attempt to contact a home after the first visit failed to yield an interview.  Such economies got AIPO by for some years, and Gallup’s descriptions of his demographic sampling probably sounded quite scientific to the statistically unlettered public, journalists, and politicians of the time.  In 1936, for instance, when the Literary Digest prominently mis-predicted that President Roosevelt would lose to Republican challenger Alfred E. Landon, Gallup accurately predicted the election correctly based on a sample that, he bragged, was only 6 percent the size of the Digest’s — a “mere” 125,000 interviews by AIPO! 

It was not until after the great debacle of 1948, when Gallup and other pollsters incorrectly predicted that Thomas E. Dewey would defeat President Harry S. Truman, that AIPO began to modernize its data collection techniques to match those of rival firms.  Meanwhile, the embarrassment of 1948 cost ARI most of its Hollywood contracts, and survey research firms in general fell into a Depression of their own.  Gallup’s prestige forever tarnished, AIPO became dependent on earnings from his other market research enterprises.