Public opinion that has relevance for several areas of social science:

1. opinions that inspire, motivate and control people in their everyday life

2. opinions about common issues for people, and about the resolution of these issues

3. opinions that give legitimacy to govts and other social institutions

4. opinions that characterize subgroups, periods and regions.

Creating Source Material for Opinion Research by means of questionnaire

 Opinion researcher – expert on everything needed, except the topic of the research at hand.
 The first rule for questionnaire authors is then to know the topic of their study and to find the
various indicators of this topic.
 Responses to questionnaires are source material, not conclusions, for the opinion researcher.
 Questionnaire must provide the researcher with all the information needed to reach the
solution to a research problem.
 It is the OR who shall calculate the answer to the research problem, not the respondents.
 Contributions of respondents are indicators in the form of responses to simple questions.

The Language in Questionnaires

 Must be an everyday language common to the entire population.

 The life world of daily activities is imbued with traditions from many generations in
rendering accepted interpretations of symbols.
 Specialization has also reduced the realm of common meanings. Nowadays no person needs
to understand very much about areas in society other than his or her own.
 A second rule of questionnaire is to use language common to all life spheres of society.
 Further study of questionnaire require us to delve on the meaning of a meaning.
 A symbol “ like the word used, is that device by which we on any one occasion can represent
an image and a notion and use it in conversation with others. 2 kinds of symbols: images
and those unrelated to images but are found in other notions used in social interactions.
(Median and Saussarian)
 Median symbols depict something in the same way as pictures do. May be reality or fantasy,
something present or absent, past or future. Its meaning is the image it conveys.
 Gesture – part of a behavior sequence that signals the total sequence, for example, a dog,
baring his teeth and assuming a certain posture is a gesture meaning “fight” to another dog.
 Symbol – gesture that evokes the same meaning in the receiver as it does in the transmitter:
in this case we have a symbol which answers to a meaning in the experience of the first
individual and which also calls out that meaning in the second individual. – person who
shouts fire!
 Saussarian – Symbols that can replace one another in a number of presentations have the
same meaning, symbols that are irreplaceable in presentations have unique meanings.
 Structuralism theory – Claude Levy Strauss: symbols are the active agents engaged in the
great struggle of survival. In this theory, man is rather incidental, a mere accessory that
helps certain symbols in their struggle for survival and hinders others.
 Leading French scholars challenged this and said that if symbols get their meaning only from
their place of presentations, meanings may shift from time to time in an arbitrary way.
 Michael Focault: there’s no objective truth. What people talk about as true statements do
not tell us how things really are but about who is in charge and has the power to establish
the meanings of our symbols.
 Post structuralism – Languages also have meanings in the form of shared and stable images.
 A third rule in questionnaire writing is to avoid as much as possible words with pure
Saussarian meanings or those established by assuming interchangeability of symbols.

The Structure of Questionnaire

 The fourth rule: to give it the structure of a conversation, albeit one with a series of short
question-answer sequences.
 A good questionnaire has an introduction with a few simple questions, followed by general
questions, then specific ones, as in a funnel.
 The acceptable questionnaire also asks about no more than one issue at a time. So that one
knows exactly which issue an answer refers to.
 Filter question – they define subgroups in the sample

An Encounter Known as an Interview

 The sum total of actions in all encounters a person has may be called his or her
repertoire of action.
 Encounter – broadest of all terms used in social science for interpersonal contacts.
 The encounter bet. Writer and respondent is the basic unit of opinion research.
 If people define a situation as real it becomes real in its consequences.
 An encounter does not have to be conceived as a meeting between living people. We
encounter Socrates by reading Plato’s dialogues.

On Opinions in Encounters

Opinion and the Motivation to Look Out for Ourselves

 People have a tendency to develop self-images that harmonize with the public views
about them in their encounters: looking glass self
 Cooley: a person’s self is a mirror like reflection of what others think of him, thus
discovering that society and personality are two sides of the same coin.
 People have an inclination towards those actions within their repertoire of actions
which result in maintaining their self-images.
 American philosopher William James had expressed the motivational significance of
public opinions in the form of evaluations by others in his famous dictum: A man’s
social me is the recognition which he gets from his mates… a man has as many social
selves as there are individuals who recognize him and carry an image of him in their
mind. The James proposition presupposes a more stable core - the conception of
one self – the complex of a human individual, and it suggests that preservation of
the core is a factor governing the other activities.
 Its significance lies rather in the fact that it is the one motive that can be most
readily manipulated by others.
 People have an inclination to choose those words and actions within their repertoire
which maintain the public view of them in their encounters.

Opinion and the Motivation to Look Out for Others

 The first motive to choose words and actions to gain approval from others in
encounters is soon supplemented by a second motive to choose words and
actions that maintain encounters and protect the encounters that rewards.
 Outer directed: those who wished to gain approval of their peer groups rather
than approval from parents and teachers.