Word: ropers
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Only about one out of ten Americans has ever gone to college, but almost all of them have ideas on the subject. Last week FORTUNE gave its summary of their views. With Pollster Elmo Roper, and an advisory board of educators, it had just completed a nationwide survey probing into everything from costs to Communism and coeducation...
...Iowa City, Pollsters George Gallup and Archibald Crossley dutifully showed up for a three-day forum on poll-taking (Elmo Roper was invited too, but took sick and couldn't make it). Gallup insisted that he enjoyed living dangerously but "I'll never be happy until we've got this thing licked." Crossley concurred: "We are not here to praise the polls, but certainly not to bury them...
...Elmo Roper, whose poll on the last election had been as wrong as the others, last week stopped his syndicated weekly newspaper column ("What People Are Thinking"). Roper said he still thinks it important to tell what people think, but he wants to spend more time investigating why they think that...
More was at stake than election polls, which are only a small part of the business of Gallup, Roper et al. The whole $25 million-a-year industry of polling, which employs 10,000 people and serves up "scientific" answers on buying habits, audience reactions, and all manner of likes & dislikes for Hollywood, businessmen, educators, magazines, etc., was under suspicion...
Last Straw? At week's end, the pollsters themselves were still trying to figure out how they had come such croppers. Roper, confessing that he "could not have been more wrong," asked a group of social scientists to check over all his pre-election data for clues. Gallup started to recheck his pre-election polls; his field workers were re-interviewing the same people to find out how they had actually voted...