The human sciences promise a better understanding of human behavior, human thought, and human choice. Championing the predictive power of their objective methodologies, the practitioners of human science have offered forecasts of future developments, as well as informed analyses of past events. The winner of the 2004 FHHS/JHBS John C. Burnham Early Career Award goes to Sarah Igo of the University of Pennsylvania, on the strength of a study that addresses crucial issues in the development of an area of human science that has played an important role in American politics and culture since World War II, the public opinion poll. The Burnham Award is awarded annually to a scholar in early career whose draft article is judged best by a committee of FHHS members; The Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences will publish the winning paper with a notice about its award, and the publisher will provide the author of the paper an honorarium of US $500.
In “Roper, Gallup, and the ‘Man in the Street’: Producing the Public Through the Polls, 1936-1953,” Igo has given historical perspective to a scientific activity that still demands attention and scrutiny, and now not only in North America. Igo goes beyond the observation of previous scholars, that “social and political polling … was inextricably tied to commercial research,” to provide a more intimate examination of just how this social scientific methodology operated and developed in the first three decades of its existence. Igo explains important shifts in the methodology—for example, from quota sampling to more random probability sampling—as well as the personal efforts of the Roper and Gallup interviewers, who were mostly middle-class women. The author carefully documents how the assumptions and prejudices of the 1940s and 1950s colored the “scientific data.” She also indicates essential failures of the social scientific community, who began to scrutinize the methodology only after the pollsters’ miscall the 1948 presidential election threatened the reputation of their fragile new industry. Only a historian who understands the broad social and political trends in the USA, as well as statistics, social psychology, and political theory, could write such a convincing account.
The research is deep, broad, and complex. It draws on the popular press as well as technical literature and personal papers; it shows the intimate connection that polling had with commercial advertising (its essential origin) and the democratic and scientific ideals of the founders, whose names still grace today’s polls. The article is a cautionary tale about social and human sciences. It is ironic, for example, that Roper, whose background was pure business, was actually more sensitive to methodological problems and issues of minority opinion, than was the famous Dr. Gallup, with his Ph.D. in applied psychology. What seems clear is that the pollsters, with their good intentions to use science for democracy, could not divert the very strong currents taking American culture toward homogeneity and corporatism. Ultimately they could only aid in the process and help create that “man in the street.”
—2004 Burnham Award Committee: Debbie Weinstein (chair), Hamilton Cravens,
and David Robinson