Migration Across the Margins
An excerpt from Survey Research in the United States: Roots and Emergence 1890-1960, selected and edited by the author, and presented by POP as the first in an occasional series of Public Opinion Classics.
Survey research did not grow up in the interstices of academic disciplines, as new specialties often have, but developed in cross-fertilization of research conducted in the realms of business, government, and the academy. Intellectual migration across the margins of these cultures describes not only the travels of Paul Lazarsfeld, who founded the Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia, but also those of Harry Field, founder of the National Opinion Research Center, and Rensis Likert, who organized the Institute For Social Research at Michigan.
Lazarsfeld was a bona fide academic, but for his early research work he was dependent on market research contracts. He chafed at the anti-business orientation of students and preached the scientific value of commercial work for the testing of instruments, the training of students and the pursuit of theory.
Field entered academic life directly from business experience with the Gallup enterprises. He looked to an academic setting to provide freedom from the pressures of the marketplace so that technical methods could be improved and public confidence in polls enhanced.
Likert was also on the edges of academic life with experience in market, industrial, and then government research. Had he remained within the academy through the Depression and World War II, it seems very unlikely that he would have had the same impetus to create a new research organization on university ground—and certainly not to export it from the federal government.
Samuel Stouffer and Hadley Cantril were very influential survey researchers during and after the war, but they did not set out to direct new survey research organizations.
In the 1940s the new organizations were permitted on—or more properly, near—the college campus, but they were not seen as particularly wise intellectual or financial investments. They inspired enthusiastic support among some academics, but among certain administrators they seem to have been viewed with caution. Among some faculty, they were viewed with positive alarm.
Why the resistance? First, for social science, the survey organizations were big. They involved at least a small entourage of student-employees and at most a veritable “army” of interviewers dispersed across the nation. This was the first instance of “big science” for sociology and social psychology in the university setting, and it did not fit into the traditional structure of departments, deans, tenure, collegial relationships, and individual autonomy. The new organizations required money in new, large amounts—not “profits,” properly speaking, but something very like it: a surplus above subsistence to sustain administrative expenses and a complex division of labor, to allow for capital growth, and to provide for long-term security for key personnel and for the organization per se. The need for money of new magnitudes thinned the insulation of the scientist from “the temptations of the marketplace.” Certainly, it did so in the eyes of wary academic colleagues.
The quantitative work of the survey researchers was perhaps the worst sticking point for some of their university colleagues. It aroused the intellectual distrust of many, including scholars who were hostile to or untrained in numbers, a group that included social scientists as well as humanistic scholars.
Quantitative work was criticized for many sins—for being anti-theoretical and barren of intellect (“dustbowl empiricism”); for triviality (“If you can count it, it isn’t worth counting”); for deliberate obscurantism, and mumbo jumbo; for pretentious explication of the obvious; for prodigal waste of money.
From some colleagues in the humanities came criticisms of deep concern. The historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., inveighed against the new research projects and organizations:
Bursting onto university campuses after the war, overflowing with portentous if vague hints of mighty wartime achievements (not, alas, to be disclosed because of security), fanatical in their zeal and shameless in their claims, [the champions of “social science” today] persuaded or panicked many university administrations [into supporting them]…; the individual scholar, so far as they were concerned, was through.
Certain humanists felt under intellectual siege by what they perceived to be an aggressive and intrusive social science, bent on arrogating for its domain the most ineffable and deeply felt human emotions and experiences. At least some things shall elude scientific capture, Joseph Wood Krutch noted, when he answered his own rhetorical question: What cannot be made the subject of scientific experiment?
Happiness is something which falls almost completely outside the purview of science. Its various degrees cannot be measured. The conditions which produce it cannot be controlled. We cannot demonstrate that an individual man either is or is not happy. In fact, his emotional state cannot even be safely inferred.
Perhaps not, but social scientists would soon be intent on trying to do so. Lazarsfeld, in fact, had already put that subject, the measurement of personal happiness, on the research agenda.
In a paper delivered at the 1947 sociology meetings, University of Chicago sociologist Herbert Blumer levied a criticism that would be an enduring one in his discipline: public opinion researchers treated society as if it were “a mere aggregation of disparate individuals” instead of an organic whole of interacting, interrelated parts.
This atomism was appropriate in certain situations, Blumer argued, as when individuals in the mass were “casting ballots, purchasing toothpaste, going to motion picture shows, and reading newspapers,” and it accounted for the successful use of sampling in consumer research. But in Blumer’s view these matters did not bear on public opinion, the organic structure of which defied sampling. Blumer named no individuals or organizations in his paper, but members of both Likert’s and Lazarsfeld’s group thought that they were being singled out for attack. Stouffer, as Blumer’s former colleague at Chicago, was probably also his quarry.
The founding entrepreneurs had to juggle the demands of their clients for useful work and those of their colleagues and students for scientifically interesting work, and university administrators demanded the while that the organization be solvent. The last was probably the most difficult as in any fledgling business. The new organizations developed through some trial and errors as the “entrepreneurs” did their best to get as much grant support as they could—they were all in search of substantial endowment, but never got it—and sought contracts for the rest.
In the struggle for solvency, the directors labored to put the best possible face on their outstanding debts and to instill hope for the prosperity and achievements still to come. A hopeful tone colors reports written to authorities (boards or university superiors) and actually makes it difficult to establish the true chronicle of what happened when. A given project, for instance, is sometimes announced as ready for publication, in fact already sent to the printer, and then later it is announced all over again as ready for publication; works in hand are sometimes grouped with works in mind, quite as though there were no essential differences between them; financial projections are ever sanguine. In these optimistic reports there was probably some strategic method for keeping other officials confident that the organizations were going to thrive. There was also conviction. If these men had not had an expansive faith in their organizations, all three could doubtless have made a substantial living in far more comfortable ways.
Very recently, another successful research entrepreneur reflected on how applied research centers should enter a university, coming into the university only under clearly understood conditions of “mutual respect and reciprocity”—especially, academic rank for the center’s director and key staff. Perhaps in our own time this is a practical prescription for success. But in the 1940s, if the research groups had insisted on these as conditions for arrival into the university, it seems fair to guess that they would have been barred at the gate. Zealots they were, but they were also petitioners, with a sense of proportion and limitation. Their acceptance and effectiveness in the long run probably depended in some good part on the very modesty and ambiguity of their demands in the beginning.
Excerpted from Survey Research in the United States: Roots and Emergence 1890-1960, by Jean M. Converse. University of California Press, 1987, and adapted by the author. Copyright © 1987 The Regents of California. Reprinted by permission.
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