What is it about?
The Literary Digest Poll (1916-1936) was the largest straw poll of its day. It was not conducted along the "scientific" standards developed later by the polling profession. The Literary Digest, a magazine that practiced non-partisan independent journalism, reported the data from its polls as-is. The editors did not correct or adjust the data as it is widely done by modern pollsters; to do so would have done violence to their journalistic ethos, which was to present "unbiased" news. However, adhering to this norm led their 1936 presidential poll to predict, disastrously, the wrong winner.
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Why is it important?
Typical assessments of the 1936 Literary Digest presidential poll are done from the perspective of modern methodological orthodoxy. College students who take a social science methods class will probably be given the Digest poll as an example of a "bad" poll: how not to conduct a poll, etc. Breaking away from this conventional approach, the paper analyzes the 1936 Digest poll by making explicit the norms that informed the journalism practiced at the Digest.
Perspectives
A lot of analysis that passes for sociology assesses events from a point of view that is foreign, or even repulsive, to the protagonists of these events. Understanding (or at least attempting to describe) the mental categories and belief-system of those we are studying is of critical importance if we are to interpret the practices they engage in.
Dominic Lusinchi
University of California, Berkeley
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Straw Poll Journalism and Quantitative Data, Journalism Studies, February 2014, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/1461670x.2014.882088.
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