Early D a y s of Public O p i n i o n

Early D a y s of Public O p i n i o n

Research In this article a senior public opinion analyst turns his memory back to describe some of the beginnings of commercial research in this area. He finds that it was the need of advertisers and space buyers to know more about the mass media that gave public opinion research its first major impetus, and also that some of the research techniques which are often thought of as recent discoveries were in use more than twenty years ago.

The author, a former President of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, currently heads the firm of Crossley, S-D Surveys, Inc.

ONE

OF THE FIRST examples of that complex of activities which we now think of as commercial public opinion research appeared shortly before the beginning of the first world war. Rather significantly, I think, it was the need to learn more about one aspect of mass communications which led to this research. Roy Eastman, who today conducts a successful organization dealing chiefly with magazine editorial research, set out in 1912 to determine for a breakfast food manufacturer the coverage of magazines carrying his advertisements. Parlin, of the Curtis Publishing Company, was working on the same general problem in that period.

There may be those who would argue that public opinion research originated with the Cherington courses in marketing, or similar courses. Others will point to the straw polls of 1824 in Harrisburg, or even to the cahiers of the French Revolution. And I have no doubt that some epigrapher or classicist will one day unearth records of an ancient civilization in which measures of people's attitudes and economic behavior were taken.

But I shall not quarrel with anyone who cites such examples, since we are interested here not in the achetype but rather in the actual beginnings of the services with which we are associated. These services, to the best of my knowledge, became establised in the business world between 1910 and 1920.

The task of locating the beginning of commercial public opinion research more precisely than this is made difficult by the fact that it has never been clearly distinguished from marketing research. The two grew together, and the point at which the one merges into the other is often impossible to locate exactly. Perhaps I can illustrate this by recalling some personal experiences.

A PERSONAL CASE HISTORY

As did quite a few others who are now active in commercial public opinion research, I entered the field through an advertising agency. The Ency-

160

PUBLIC OPINION QUARTERLY

clopedia Britannica is only substantially correct in recording the first survey department within an agency as having been formed in 1919. At the time I organized such a department for a Philadelphia advertising firm in December 1918, a few others were already in existence, a fact which is mentally entrenched through memory of a dialogue which took place when I was hired. In refusing to give me a job as a copywriter, my prospective employer asked me how I would like to set up a research department. I said: "I would. What is it?" And his answer was: "I don't know either." His interest in the subject had been engendered by the new service, research, which some agencies were offering their clients as a means of obtaining accounts.

T o find out what research was all about, I made a tour of the New York agencies, and was particularly impressed by the work being done by the old George Batten Company, forerunner of the present Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborn agency. The Curtis Publishing Company also had a very active research department at that time, one of the members of which, I believe, is still serving. Several other magazine publishers likewise maintained research departments.

One indication of the degree to which research had been accepted at this time was the fact that a confidence man had already appeared on the scene.

H e operated under various aliases, and was fairly successful in selling a trumped-up reporting service, which allegedly gave actual sales figures of groups of companies broken down by regions.

THE IMPORTANT ROLE OF THE MASS MEDIA

I noted above that the communications-oriented nature of early research seemed to me significant. This is partly because such research has continued ever since, almost without interruption, and partly because of its dollar volume. It would be difficult to measure the latter accurately, but our organization alone has spent quite a few millions on it, and others have too, in addition to the many firms which have spent smaller sums.

Of greater significance than continuation and volume, however, would seem to be the way in which research on the mass media gradually led us into a large number of different aspects of public opinion research. In the service of the buyer and seller of advertising space and time, attention has been devoted not only to the number and nature of the impressions created by the written or spoken commercials, but also to the characteristics of the mass media's public and to the development of the media themselves. Continuous efforts have been made to improve the editorial content of magazines, radio and television programs, and so on. Although the immediate objective of improving content was to build sales, the result has been to give people what they want and what they can use.

Some of our own experiences will serve to illustrate the way in which the

EARLY DAYS OF PUBLIC OPINION RESEARCH

161

mass media stimulated development of opinion research in the early days.

In 1927, the Frank Seaman Advertising Agency asked Crossley, Incorporated, to utilize its field staff in order to determine whether or not network commercials were actually being carried by the local stations. The discovery that some of these stations had been substituting local commercials and collecting for both local and national time, without ~ r o v i d i nthe ~ latter, resulted in some substantial rebates and a bit of consternation on the part of the network.

Early in 1929 Sam Giellerup of the Seaman Agency wanted another such check-up made, but accepted instead my suggestion that this time we try to measure the size of the radio audience. A little testing confirmed the belief that in those days very few non-telephone subscribers had radio receivers.

Here, then, was a means of covering all parts of an area simultaneously and cheaply, with a minimum of elapsed time and wit'h an ideal sample. In this way, the first continuing radio ratings and the first widespread, regular use of the telephone as a research method were inaugurated. A few months before this, Dan Starch had made an exploratory study of the size and nature of the radio audience for the National Broadcasting Company, using personal interviews.

The need for reliable information on circulation figures was responsible very early for the establishment of the Audit Bureau of Circulations, before which some circulation claims were fanciful. It was not until 1938, however, that the concept of magazine coverage shifted from audited counts of copies to actual measure of the numbers of readers. In that year, following suggestions by George Gallup, our organization made the first such study of a continuing national nature for Life Magazine, at the request of Cornelius DuBois.

From beginnings such as these, research on radio and magazines expanded to include studies of other media, quantitative analysis, effectiveness analysis, and other subjects.

SOME ROOTS OF MODERN RESEARCH DEVICES

Quite a few of the research techniques which have been highly developed in relatively recent times could be seen in operation even before the twenty year period with which this issue of the Public Opinion Quarterly is primarily concerned. In studies made by various advertising agencies in the early days, open questions allowing free expression of opinion were frequent. Product testing was also common in those days, one of my vivid recollections as an interviewer being that of a bleeding left hand clutching a handkerchief surreptitiously in a pocket to avoid biasing housewives' comments during a demonstration of a jar-capping device.

The use of the unstructured interview with men expertly trained to operate with no formalized questionnaire and a minimum of note-taking goes back

162

PUBLIC OPINION QUARTERLY

at least 15 years, one of its earliest exponents being the late Paul W. Stewart.

To the best of my recollection, I first heard the phrase "depth interview" from Rensis Likert in the late thirties, but the device of continuing probes, now referred to as one of the features of "motivation research," goes back many years before that. The first specific memory I have of the use of word association was in connection with a national sterling silver survey in 1928 or 1929. While fairly certain that some of the non-visual projective techniques were in use during this same period, I could not cite cases.

Commercial communications research remained almost entirely quantitative for many years. An early exception to quantitative domination, however, was the scaling technique proposed by the writer to the Literawy Digest in about 1924, and used extensively thereafter. This made use of the printed likeness of a large thermometer, and requested respondents to fill in the names of magazines according to degrees of interest intensity. Another exception was general effort, starting early in the thirties, to measure the effectiveness of radio in terms of comparisons between purchasers among listeners and non-listeners. In the early days of sampling there was, and it may be noted that there still is occasionally, a tendency to think of cases taken "at random" as being typical or representative of a universe, although the term "universe" was not used. When the transition was made from "at random" to true "randomization," the lily was gilded with the phrase "scientific Sampling." This gilding, I would say, was done at the time of the introduction of the national polls on political issues in the mid-thirties. Actually, however, reasonably reliable stratified or quota sampling methods were in use in marketing research ten to fifteen years before this. Already at that time the eÂŁfort was to establish what George Gallup later so aptly called a "micro* America," by selecting the sample so it would be representative of all possible breakdowns, as shown by the latest census.

T o the best of my recollection this use of the word "scientific" was the first of the long string of competitive catchwords which has so thoroughly characterized claims about sampling and interviewing methods. While the bruiting of the word "probability" did not achieve its fanfare until the 1948 nadir of the palltakers, the word had been used considerably earlier, and many probability principles had been used for a long period-e.g., rotation and randomization of blocks, road segments, homes, and individuals, and the assignment of specific locations to interviewers.

EXPANSION OF OPINION RESEARCH

William Albig, in his excellent book Modern Public Opinion picks 1930 as the approximate date since which many articles have appeared on the theory and method of attitude measurement. Only a few years later Gallup began his American Institute of Public Opinion, and the three national

EARLY DAYS OF PUBLIC OPINION RESEARCH

163

cross section presidential polls began in 1936. The first Fortune Poll was presented in the July 1935 issue of that magazine. It was also about this time that certain sociologists assumed prominent roles in marketing and public opinion research. Scaling techniques were being talked about, and qualitative analysis began to draw considerable attention. Not long thereafter came the introduction of playback techniques and other retention, as well as attention measurements.

It seems fair, therefore, to place the coming of age of public opinion research as we now understand it at about 20 years ago, not much before the time the first issue of the Public Opinion Quarterly appeared. Nevertheless, apart from its association with marketing research, public opinion research remained quite limited in both method and scope for several years after this.

It was slow to expand out of the quantitative stage and extremely slow to realize some of its true sociological potential. The advent of the second world war may be blamed for some of this slowness as far as the commercial side is concerned.

Shortly after the war, however, the scope of opinion research began to broaden rapidly. Our own organization made use of opinion research in a number of court cases, one of which was the well-known Esquire case which involved use of the mails following publication of certain drawings. Julian Woodward of the Roper organization ran an important study on racial relations in the south for court purposes. The National Opinion Research Center began its health studies. The Gallup and Roper Polls, and others, expanded into questions dealing with many non-political problems. And the widespread sociological application of public opinion research was on its way.

A LOOK AHEAD

In conclusion, while my assignment confines me to the "early days," perhaps I may be permitted a brief personal assessment of those days in the light of modern methods.

I am one who feels that in relation to the potential development of public opinion research, our progress has not been rapid. If we may say fairly that public opinion research as we now understand it is roughly 20 years old, then it is to be hoped, and believed, that the progress in the next two decades will be more rapid than it has been in the past two decades.

Modern sampling gives us distinctly better data to work with and we have more experience and better methods. W e have learned the efficiency of properly distributed small samples, the importance of callbacks when specific locations are assigned, and some valuable new techniques. But certainly many of us are too smugly satisfied that, if we can somehow adapt the term "probability" to what we are doing, we can blithely ignore the requisites of true probability sampling. There are many so-called probability samples to-

164

PUBLIC OPINION QUARTERLY

day that are operated in a manner which yields results distinctly inferior to those given by well-handled stratified samples.

Our potential improvement in sampling methods over the next score of years is, of course, far less than in other aspects of research since the difference resulting from the use of several alternative methods, when all are handled in an optimum manner, can only be a few percentage points.

The greatest possibilities for future development seem to me to lie in finding better methods to elicit true information and attitudes from respondents. In this, the 1948 experience has served the poll takers well. W e know now not only that people do not always act later as they say earlier that they will act, but we have made a good start toward learning about (a) how to ascertain their underlying feelings, and (b) how to project those feelings into probable actions. From this start it seems to me that we can expand greatly in the future. And I know of no area in all marketing as well as public opinion research where progress is more needed than that of learning how to get at and 'evaluate basic attitudes.

As far as the scope of our operations is concerned, we can be pleased that public opinion research has at last risen above the nose-counting stage and has begun to make a substantial contribution to the solution of a broad range of problems in the United States. And beyond that, we can take ride in the fact that opinion research has spread over almost all the free world.