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Dissertation Information for Daniel J. Robinson

NAME:
- Daniel J. Robinson

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- [No Discipline Recorded]

SCHOOL:
- York University (USA) (1997)

ADVISORS:
- None

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- None

MPACT Status: Incomplete - Not_Inspected

Title: Polling consumers and citizens: Opinion sample surveys and the rise of the Canadian marketing polity, 1928-1945

Abstract: "This study examines the origins and early years of public opinion polling in Canada, from the late 1920s until 1945. Significantly, it situates opinion polling within the larger context of two important forerunners: market research surveys and American opinion polling, both of which defined the conceptual and methodological underpinnings of opinion polling in Canada. When introduced in 1941, Canada's first opinion polling operation, the George Gallup-affiliated Canadian Institute of Public Opinion (CIPO), promised to strengthen democratic expression by recording and promoting the views of ordinary citizens. The CIPO, like its American counterpart, championed polling as a ""scientific"" counterweight to the political might wielded by state officials, politicians, pressure groups and business lobbyists. The voices of the ""common people"" could now be heard and heeded by those in power.

Polling's rhetorical promotion, however, contrasted with its actual practice, and later its nascent political and social functions. Opinion polling developed as an outgrowth of market research surveys, which primarily targeted those consumers comprising the ""buying public,"" usually middle and upper-class urban homemakers. These surveys almost never encompassed cross-sections of the adult population. Similarly, when Gallup polling began in the United States and Canada, selected categories of ""citizens"" were overrepresented. Because the scientific authority and commercial viability of the early opinion polls were measured against their success in election forecasting, Gallup pollsters undersampled social groups judged least likely to vote. In the United States, these were predominantly women, blacks, and the poor, and in Canada the same held for women and low socio-economic groups. The Gallup-sampled polity and the adult population were by no means synonymous. Similarly, the Canadian government's secret and extensive use of Gallup polling during World War II to mobilize public sentiment contradicted the CIPO's professed democratic mission. Polling functioned not as a means to elicit ordinary opinions for policy planning, but as a technique of instrumental rationality to discern the most effective strategies for formulating and disseminating state propaganda."

MPACT Scores for Daniel J. Robinson

A = 0
C = 2
A+C = 2
T = 0
G = 0
W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2009-05-16 23:46:13

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