ON OCTOBER 13, 1982, The New York Times published the results of a telephone survey that had been conducted among Connecticut residents the previous week. In the Senate race, the poll indicated that the Democratic challenger, Toby Moffett, had a narrow 43-38 percent lead over incumbent Senator Lowell Weicker among registered adults. That same morning, The Hartford Courant published the results of its most recent survey, conducted by the University of Connecticut during the same week as The Times survey. The Courant survey reported results diametrically opposed to those reported in The Times. According to the Courant poll, Senator Weicker had for the first time "surged ahead of his Democratic challenger," forging a 16-point lead among registered adults.Adding to the confusion was the fact that both The Times and The Courant found the incumbent Democratic governor, William O'Neill, comfortably ahead in his quest for reelection by almost identical margins. The Times survey showed O'Neill leading Republican Lewis Rome by a 52-32 margin among all registered adults, while The Courant found him ahead by a margin of 55-31.The problem, then, was not simply to determine which survey was right, but rather to explain how the two surveys could be so divergent Abstract Conflicting poll results from the New York Times and the Hartford Courant concerning the 1982 Connecticut senatorial contest led to the hypothesis that when voting preferences in. two contests are measured in the same poll, question order will affect candidate standings. A subsequent poll, based on a split-sample design, verified this hypothesis. The relation of the question order effect to party identification, candidate preference, political ideology, and education is also examined.Irving Crespi is the owner of the survey firm Irving Crespi and Associates. Dwight

The critical importance of marginal constituencies and wards in determining national and local election results in England leads to the question ‘What makes a ward marginal? ’ The results of research on 384 electoral contests over ten years in Birmingham shows that the social class composition of a ward primarily determines its marginality or safety. The class composition associated with a high degree of marginality is as follows: for every non-manual worker there are likely to be twice as many foremen and skilled manual workers, and for every non-manual worker there are likely to be between one and a half and twice as many semi and unskilled manual workers. The further a ward departs from these ratios the more likely it is to be safe for the Labour or Conservative Party. The ratios are highly reliable in picking out marginal and safe wards in normal political periods involving only small swings of electoral opinion between the parties. During abnormal periods, such as the landslide against the Labour Party between 1965 and 1969, the ratios shift slightly but are nevertheless a good indicator of marginal propensity.

Michigan, 1955. 205 pp. NPL. While for many years anthropologists were mainly interested in studying primitive man, they are now also applying their concepts to the study of the advanced societies in which they live. Nowhere is this process likely to bear more useful fruit than in the field of education.Education and Anthropology has 10 sections, each consisting of a paper, discussants' comments, and a verbatim report of the subsequent open discussion at a four-day conference of 22 university professors qualified in one or the other of these two fields. They deal with a wide range of topics and are more concerned with school education than with adult education.They explore the nature of the anthropologist's potential contribution to education, but strongly affirm that it is not so much the &dquo;hiring&dquo; of anthropologists for specific tasks that is needed, but that teachers should themselves learn and apply anthro-pological ways of thinking about culture, personality, and values to the classroom and community situations with which they deal.Reading this book, one can realize how valuable an experience this conference was to the highly competent people who attended it, but the book is written in their language and a great deal of it deals with highly abstract conceptions in very technical terms. It is not produced for the ordinary teacher and adult educator. Is it too much to hope that one outcome of this conference may be that shorter and much simpler books on this subject may be written for the rank-and-file layman and laywoman?A good third of the book contains the verbatim record of discussions.I personally found this a prolix and untidy way of presenting the relevant information. Still more irritating to me was the use of Christian names in the records of discussion. We are told that these were left in so that outsiders could get the friendly and informal feel of the conference from the book, but I doubt if this hope will be realized in the absence of those visual and affective elements which make or mar a conference but which cannot be recorded in print.

No abstract

No abstract