Main trends of research in the social and human ... - unesdoc - Unesco

Cross-cultural, cross-societal and cross-national research 661
Here, the principal possibilities are private counting operations (church atten-
dance, statistics of party and union memberships) and ad hoc sample surveys. So
far, very little has been done to make use of such data in computer programmes
for cross-national comparison, but efforts are at least under way to establish
a basis for such analyses through the development of archives of raw data from
sample surveys for different countries.
The practice of interviewing samples of populations can be traced to several
distinct historical roots. One line of development may be traced to the official
census: sampling procedures were developed to cut down the cost of censuses
of social conditions, particularly studies of poverty, unemployment and sub-
standard housing, and at the same time made it possible to gather information
in greater detail than in official data gathering operations. Another line of devel-
opment derives from the election, the public referendum, the plebiscite. 'Straw
polls' and opinion soundings served as short cuts to information on the inclina-
tions and preferences of the general public. At first, up to the middle I~~OS,
there were few points of contact between these two traditions of inquiry, but this
changed radically with the emergence of large-scale organizations for the con-
duct of interview studies, first under commercial auspices, later also within govern-
ment departments and universities. The mass interview was found to be a
flexible instrument of social inquiry and soon proved its usefulness in a wide
range of contexts. In fact, it combined at least six hitherto distinct models of
social and behavioural data gathering within one unified operation : the census
questionnaire, the standardized observation checklist, the informal reportorial
conversation, the referendum, the election, and the psychological test. This
flexibility proved the great strength of the interview as a research procedure, but
at least in the initial phases caused a good deal of confusion and contro~ersy.4~
The late thirties saw a great mushrooming of private organizations for the
conduct of interviews within samples of national populations, first in the United
States, then in Britain and in France. This movement continued at an accelerated
tempo during the years immediately following the end of hostilities in 1944-45.
By 1950, all the economically advanced countries of the West, and even some
'Third World' countries, had seen the establishment of at least one private
polling organization in its territory. Most of these were brought into one of the
two world networks of polling agencies: Gallup Affiliates or the initially Roper-
linked International Research Associates (INRA). These two networks served
crucial functions in the internationalization of the polling profession. They
spread techniques and standards from country to country, they accumulated
experiences in the use of equivalent question formulations and measurement tech-
niques across different countries, they offered facilities for conducting compara-
tive surveys by governmental agencies, business corporations, and even academic
scholars.
But this was only the first of three distinctive developments in this field of
data gathering : increasingly, governmental agencies developed staffs for con-
ducting sample surveys, and a number of academic institutions were able to set
up field organizations of some sort, whether separately or through various joint
arrangements.