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

664 Stein Rokkan
content of oral or textual messages helped survey analysts to find ways of coping
with ‘open-ended‘ responses and to develop techniques for the extraction of
significant dimensions of variation in the flow of messages recorded by the
interviewers.
The rapid expansion of the international networks of interview organizations
did much to develop comparable procedures for opinion soundings and market
studies across several different countries at the time.4z Only a handful of academic
social scientists took an interest in these international developments
during the first decade or so, but at least a few imaginative beginnings were
made. A pioneer in the use of these new techniques of cross-national research
was the American psychologist Hadley Cantril. He showed how this machinery
of data gathering could be used to throw light on central problems in the study
of international communication : his msco-sponsored study, How Nations
See Each Other,43 was the first in a series of attempts to make systematic use of
national interview organizations in theory-oriented comparative research. He
also pointed out the possibilities of drawing on the rapidly increasing production
of interview data for comparative secondary analysis. His voluminous
compilation of 6ndings through 194644 paved the way for subsequent efforts to
assemble not only press releases and reports from the many interview organizations
of the world, but also the raw data of their studies as recorded on punched
cards or tapes.
The next great wave of internationalization occurred around the second half
of the 1950s. These years saw the beginning of the data archiving movement,45
and witnessed a marked increase of scholarly interest in the international
potentialities of the new techniques of data gathering. From the mid-fifties
onward, there was a continuous ferment of plans, designs and schemes for
cross-cultural and cross-national data gathering and data analysis, and a great
many of these generated important bodies of data and led to interesting analytical
innovations. The great majority of centrally coordinated projects were American
in origin. Until well into the ‘sixties it was possible to raise funds for such
costly academic research enterprises only from us agencies and foundations. Any
priority listing of such American projects will of necessity be arbitrary, but
these seem to me to be most important examples of academically oriented
data gathering operations across three or more countries since the early fifties:
The earliest of all co-ordinated survey studies in developing countries was
the study covering six Middle Eastern countries initiated by Lazarsfeld at the
Columbia University Bureau of Applied Social Research during 1949-51 :
this was at first presented only in a few internal reports, but was later analysed
within a broader theoretical framework by Daniel Lerner.6 Parallel survey
research efforts in the developing countries were pursued by Hadley Cantril,
the great pioneer of cross-national polling. He set up an Institute for International
Social Research at Princeton, N.J., and with his colleague, Lloyd Free, organized
a great number of studies on mass and elite attitudes across the world.
The most important of these detailed reports covered the administration of his
‘Self-Anchoring Striving Scale’ on five continents: in four highly developed
countries (USA, Federal Republic of Germany, Israel and Japan), in three very