A gallery of misapprehensions

the importance of survey research in political and social decisions

Abstract

The 20th century is often hailed as the great century of social research. A list of all of the pioneering milestones in the field of social research could just go on and on: the inspiration empirical social researchers have gained from the methods and findings in the field of psychology; the methodological advances that accompanied the blossoming of empirical market and media research; the development of other new tools in the field of empirical social research, especially the combination of media content analysis and the survey method; the tremendous advances in computer-aided data analysis—all of these are indisputable accomplishments of the 20th century. Despite all of these advances, however, empirical social research has yet to establish itself in society or even across broad swaths of the scientific community. The greatest obstacle facing empirical social research today is that empirical thinking is still not commonplace among most social scientists and politicians. This paper was presented at the WAPOR Seminar “Current Perspectives in Polling” at the Escola Superior de Comunicação Social, Lisbon, March 21, 2005.