The Rhetorical Use of Random Sampling: Crafting and Communicating the Public Image of Polls as a Science (1935–1948)

Abstract

The scientific pollsters (Archibald Crossley, George H. Gallup, and Elmo Roper) emerged onto the American news media scene in 1935. Much of what they did in the following years (1935-1948) was to promote both the political and scientific legitimacy of their enterprise. They sought to be recognized as the sole legitimate producers of public opinion. In this essay I examine the, mostly overlooked, rhetorical work deployed by the pollsters to publicize the scientific credentials of their polling activities, and the central role the concept of sampling has had in that pursuit. First, they distanced themselves from the failed straw poll by claiming that their sampling methodology based on quotas was informed by science. Second, although in practice they did not use random sampling, they relied on it rhetorically to derive the symbolic benefits of being associated with the "laws of probability."

How to train your oracle: The Delphi method and its turbulent youth in operations research and the policy sciences

“…George Gallup, Archibald Crossley and Elmo Roper had successfully established the polling business and, as a prerequisite, the legitimacy of polling methods (especially of sampling techniques) in the late 1930s (cf. Igo, 2006, 2007: 103–149; Lusinchi, 2017). There was a well-established body of methods to assess opinions on specific issues, on which the methodology proposed by Kaplan, Skogstad and Girshick could be based.…”

More work, better health? The moderation effect of employee-organizational psychological distance

“…Studies have shown that the eastern was the most densely populated regions of China (Li et al, 2018), and the number of employees of it was higher than that of the western region (Ye et al, 2015). Therefore, we divided the investigation into two stages by combining directional typical and random sampling (Lusinchi, 2017). In the first stage, the research team focused on obtaining the data of employees in eastern China, and the second stage of investigation concentrated on supplementing the data of eastern China, as well as obtaining the relevant data of western China.…”

Intersecting aims, divergent paths: The Allensbach Institute, the Institute for Social Research, and the making of public opinion research in 1950s West Germany

“…By drawing attention to the motivations and justifications behind West German opinion research in its initial development phase in the late 1940s and 1950s, this article provides a much-needed international perspective on themes that Sarah Igo and Dominic Lusinchi have illuminated in the pages of this journal: the claims by opinion pollsters that empirical opinion polling methods were both "scientific" and "a tool for democracy," as well as the ways in which the corporate context in which modern opinion polling emerged in the United States shaped the capacities of pollsters to live up to those claims (Igo, 2006;Lusinchi, 2017). To do so, this article brings together analysis of sources from institutional and government archives with a rich body of research on public opinion polling in West Germany, much of which has not yet been translated into English.…”