PUBLIC OPINION RESEARCH AS SCIENCE, IPSA

In: Public opinion quarterly: journal of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, Band 20, Heft 3, S. 493-500

Abstract

PO res is many things to many people: a business, a pol'al device, an instrument of propaganda, an art. It is also, however, a sci'fic endeavor. The difficulties of quantification in studying problems relating to society do not exclude them from the province of sci conceived as the systematic search for truth by the method of rational intelligence. Sci as a human soc activity cannot arbitrarily stop short of man & his essential S-cul environment. PO res should be viewed not as an independent sci, but rather as a specialized subarea of res. For this reason, opinion researchers should not be trained as such; we should rather train sociol'ts, psychol'ts, pol'al sci'ts, etc, with specialization in PO study. IPSA.