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No. 2]
PUBLIC OPINION
POLLS
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tudes and resistanceto answering are dealt with fairly competently. Great care is lavished on the choice of questions to be
asked, upon the way they are worded, and on the particular
place of each in the sequence or order of asking. There are
questions the only purpose of which is to get the respondent
talking and which are used as interview openers; there are
" parting shots " or " scuttle and run " questions that can be
asked only at the end. There are also recognized kinds of
questionsthat cannot be asked becausethey reveal the ignorance
of the respondent,embarrasshim, or otherwise disturb him and
destroy rapport with the interviewer. Besides reliance on a
general body of lore on " how to ask questions", there is in
every well-conducted study a great deal of experimentation,or
as the pollsters would call it, "pretesting ". Questionnaires
usually go through four or five and sometimes more revisions.
The questionnaireis tried out in the field, brought back and
revised, tried out again and again revised, in a processthat goes
on until all the " bugs" in it are eliminated.
Pretesting produces a polling questionnairethat is askablein
the sensethat it arousesno resistanceand gets opinionson propositions that have been carefully framed so as to be understandable and meaningful to respondents. Pretesting does not of
course guarantee that the basic design of the researchis sound
and that the questions asked are adequateto give a real picture
of the attitudes of the public on an issue. It is on this point of
adequacythat the polls are weakest today. They tell something
about the attitude of a public on an issue,but often not enough;
and frequently a little knowledge, because it gives a false sense
of assurance,is more dangerousthan no knowledge at all. There
are three aspects of a public's attitude that are frequently
neglected in the polls, and yet some judgment must be formed
with respect to each of them before one can truly appraisethe
weight that should be given to an expressedopinion. The three
aspects are (1) the information on which the opinion is based,
(2) the strength or intensity of feeling back of the opinion, and
(3) the stability or permanence of the opinion, or, in other
words, the likelihoodthat it will be changed in any given future
period.
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L. WOODWARD