Word: cantril
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...public-opinion polling industry. George Gallup, whose chief employment is with Young and Rubicam's advertising agency, located his polling headquarters in Princeton for the sake of proximity to his farm in the nearby New Jersey hills. Quite coincidentally at the same point in the mid-Thirties psychologist Hadley Cantril succeeded in setting up the University-sponsored Office of Public Opinion Research, sole complete archives of all findings by the various agencies, as well as "Public Opinion Quarterly," the single authoritative compilation of developments within the trade...
Princeton pioneered in the field, Spurts of expansion this Fall at Michigan's Survey Research Center under Francis Likert and at Chicago's National Opinion Research Center (formerly the Donver Poll) are the climax of the preliminary gestures of Cantril and his associates for the past decade. After Gallup's first national poll in 1936 proved that the Literary Digest was wrong, the Cantril concept of small sampling polls as against mass surveys, now utterly beyond question, began to take shape in the development of the spot-check method...
This device became perfected so completely that by 1939 Government leaders could expect single-day response on an informational request, such as what the miners of West Virginia felt about a certain public issue. In 1940 Cantril's "Invasion of Mars," a study of public reaction to the famed Orson Welles broadcast, assumed the proportions of a classic in social psychology. Another of Cantril's efforts, the Leadership Poll, made a significant contribution with its culling of labor and business chieftain viewpoints on current affairs...
...indeed fortunate that the chief commercial agency, Dr. Gallup's, cropped up in the same location as the focus for academic research in the field. When Cantril and Gallup got their heads together they really sparked pretty well." The latest attempt to hold to standards, Allpot adds, is also Princeton-pushed: the International Congress of Public Opinion Research inaugurated at Williamstown in September and destined to lead to a certification system to insure reliable personnel...
...real invasion by Martians of superior intelligence and formidable machines. So realistically was it presented by Orson Welles, that citizens actually called their police stations and offered to help save the country from the invading Martians. A psychological interpretation of the panic was written by Professor George W. Cantril of Princeton entitled "The Invasion From Mars," containing the original script, and may be obtained at Widener Library...