What is it about?
There was more to this "fiasco" than mere polling error. Two subplots lurked behind this crisis. First, by 1948 the sample survey had become a preeminent tool of the social sciences, its failure, as exemplified by the polls, threatened the scientific legitimacy of social research. Secondly, the survey research community (pollsters and others) had been split between quota sample and probability sample advocates: no side had yet been able to establish its dominance. The polling failure tipped the balance in favor of probability sampling, which gradually became the "gold standard" of survey practice in the U.S.
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Why is it important?
The polling failure of 1948 teaches two things. First, it exemplifies how the leaders in a field of "scientific" activity take charge of the discourse so that their unique depiction of an event will disseminate as the correct narrative of that occurrence. Second, it shows how a seemingly legitimate "scientific" practice (quota sampling) is jettisoned in favor of "better" one (probability sampling).
Perspectives
It is a mistake to study human activity, be it scientific or not, as if it were a slow road towards "progress." Of course, practitioners will always tell the world that their current practices are the best there is. But as students of society, it is not our place to accept or reject practitioners contentions, rather we seek to understand why they come about to make those claims. The history of the social scientific practice of survey research is a good example of how a methodology that was once considered "scientific" (quota sampling), was then rejected as "unscientific" and replaced by probability sampling, which was ascribed the scientific label. Nowadays, the field of polling and survey research is dominated by what probability sampling fundamentalists would consider "unscientific": the Internet poll.
Dominic Lusinchi
University of California, Berkeley
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: ‘The Great Fiasco’ of the 1948 presidential election polls: status recognition and norms conflict in social science, Annals of Science, April 2018, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/00033790.2018.1466194.
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