Education: Academic Pollsters

A poll to check on polls was started last week at the University of Denver. Called the National Opinion Research Center, it claimed to be the first non-commercial organization to measure public opinion in the U.S. Its functions: to take its own polls on all sorts of public questions, to analyze results of other polls, to study how to improve polling methods.

Marshal Field, backer of the New York tabloid PM, put up the money. The Center’s board of directors includes two social psychologists, Princeton’s Professor Hadley Cantril and Harvard’s Professor Gordon W. Allport, and University of Denver’s Chancellor Caleb F. Gates Jr., onetime star Princeton tackle and track man. For active operators the academicians will lean on two experienced pollsters, British-born Harry H. Field (no kin to Marshall Field), who worked six years for George Gallup and organized the British Institute of Public Opinion, and F. Douglas Williams, who worked for Elmo Roper, conductor of the FORTUNE Poll.

The Denver poll promises to lay emphasis on research on polling methods, a thing which is the urgent concern of all reliable pollsters. It also intends to take polls, at cost, for legislators and U.S. Congressmen who may want to know what their own constituents think about specific issues, for Government departments, for educators, for non-profit organizations. Sample poll under consideration: what do Denverites think of the controversial syst em of Progressive education in their public schools?

The Center is Harry Field’s idea and both Messrs. Roper and Gallup have given their blessing. Because private U.S. polls sometimes disagree and often are challenged, he hopes his Center may become a sort of Audit Bureau of Polls (like the press’s Audit Bureau of Circulations). The Center will have a national staff of interviewers and a group of scholars at headquarters constantly studying results. Chief polling problems to be worked on, Field believes, are 1) more scientific wording of questions, 2) a method of measuring how strongly people feel on a given question. As an example of polls’ disagreement, he cites a sizable discrepancy in recent Gallup and FORTUNE polls on whether the U.S. people favor sending an air force to Europe. Gallup said 24% were in favor, FORTUNE, 35.5%. Field’s explanation: the Gallup question was loaded with the phrase: “to help the British.”