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

Cross-cultural, cross-societal and cross-national research 663
The academic survey organization also remained true to the census model,
but added two further elements:
- the fixed-category test battery,
- the informal reportorial conversation.
Historically, the test battery grew out of the standardized scholastic examination.
By contrast to the single-question approach of the plebiscite-modelled poll,
the test-type interview elicited responses to a wide range of items within the same
fields of variation, and offered the basis for a variety of summary measures of
tendencies, orientations, attitudes, personality syndromes. The techniques of
test administration had initially been developed in the classroom and in the
study of other ‘found‘ groups of subjects but was, after some experientation,
adjusted to the requirements of the ‘doorstep’ interview. This development
opened up a number of opportunities for innovation, not only in the range
and depth of data gathering, but also in the style of statistical refinement. The
commercial polls had typically limited themselves to elementary statistical
treatments of their data: most of the findings were presented in simple‘percentage
tables. With the introduction of multi-item test batteries, there was a
marked increase in the statistical sophistication of survey analysis: the responses
collected through interview surveys were not only subject to the typical correlation
and factor analytical treatments of the type known from the earlier phase
of differential and educational psychology, but also offered opportunities for
the development of powerful new techniques better adapted to the qualitative
character of the data, such as Guttman scaling, Lazarsfeld’s latent structure
analysis, and various forms of attribute space analysis.
A major characteristic of the full-blown academic survey operation is its
extreme flexibility: it allows the combination of elements from all the models of
‘bureaucratic’ data gathering and adds another, perhaps still more important,
model, the informal conversation among strangers. The Survey Research Center
at the University of Michigan made a pioneering contribution to the development
of the informal, ‘open-ended’ interview as a tool for data gathering: there
had been an increasing awareness of the artificiality of many of the response
categories in the fixed-alternative questions inherited from the census model,
and even more so, those taken from the plebiscite model, and more and more
elaborate attempts were made to approximate the flow of informal colloquial
conversation without jeopardizing the imperative controls of cross-interview
comparability. This linked up with a number of parallel developments in the
‘case-oriented’ behavioural sciences : the therapeutic conversation inherited from
the religious practice of confession and perfected in the various schools of
psychoanalysis, the counselling interview developed within social work traditions
and in educational psychology, the personnel interview developed within
management psychology, the informal questioning of informants practised for
decades by cultural and social anthropologists in their studies of preliterate
and traditional communities. These movements on the data elicitation front
were reinforced by concomitant developments on the data categorization - data
processing front. The efforts made in linguistics, folklore and communications
research to elaborate techniques for the statistical analysis of the style and