What do pollution, sex with your co-worker and dieting have in common? How about prayer, the invasion of Haiti and newspaper readership? What connects homelessness, the existence of heaven and capital punishment?
Somebody has done a poll on each of them.
At points during the O.J. Simpson coverage, the information has been sliced and diced so thin that there have been polls on whether there’s too much O.J. media coverage, whether the coverage is fair, whether a trial can be fair, whether he should get the death penalty-and, of course, variations of opinion based on whether the poll respondent is black or white.
The proliferation of polls has become so striking that next time someone asks, “How ya doin’?” you might want to check CNN, Gallup or USA Today before you answer.
Or, you could just put in a call to the University of Chicago.
As polling swells, bloats, invades and infects us more and more, it turns out that one of the oldest, biggest and most respected public opinion survey organizations in the nation is right here.
For more than 50 years, interviewers from the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center have been quietly, scientifically, often ploddingly, ringing doorbells and telephones across the land to discover how we feel about toxic waste, masturbation, religion, crime, money-even how we feel about England.
A ground-breaking sex survey by the center is due out in October.
Rev. Andrew Greeley’s well-known religion surveys come out of the center. And information now being collected will determine how worthwhile it is to get a college degree these days. The school data could lead to massive changes in American education policy.
But if the center is so good and so big, how come it’s so unknown?
“We’ve never really tried to establish ourselves in the public mind,” says Tom W. Smith, director of the center’s General Social Survey, a $1 million annual government-funded undertaking that has charted our national mood swings since 1972.
“I’d be surprised if one person out of 100 has heard of us,” says Smith, speaking like the pollster that he is.
Smith’s survey is a massive, annual face-to-face questioning of 1,500 scientifically-selected adults that has become the backbone of policy planning and research on such enduring national issues as race, violence, poverty, abortion, defense spending, confidence in our presidents and on and on and on.
As Smith describes the center’s work-painstaking and reliable-it becomes clear that some of today’s headline-grabbing polls are sort of the one-night stands of public opinion research. The National Opinion Research Center, by strong contrast, is a long and steady marriage.
It should come as no surprise that the center has done a poll on polls, or in the parlance of pollster Smith, “a survey of the survey research firms.”
There are more than 1,000 polling outfits out there now asking how we feel on topics ranging from breakfast to bustlines. Some of these, such as CBS/New York Times or the Gallup Organization or Louis Harris and Associates, appear often in newspapers and on televison.
Smith says, “That gives them instant credibility,” with the reading and viewing public.
(Incidentally, polls show, 13 percent of that public would watch more television if they had four extra hours a day, compared with 32 percent who claim they would read more if they had some spare time.)
“The public isn’t our main audience. Our audience is either academics or the federal government,” says Smith, as he pulls charts and graphs from the file cabinets that cram his small office in a bland gray building on 60th Street in Hyde Park.
In another gray office in another dull building, this one on 55th Street, 113 telephones are set up at 113 computer stations for men and women with a persuasive manner and pleasant demeanors. Their job is to ask questions, some highly personal, and enter the answers in carefully designed computer programs.
The polling business is so booming-$31 million this year at the center, 95 percent of it in federal government contracts-that a new phone survey office has been set up in west suburban Downers Grove.
Whether the surveys are in person or on the phone, interviewers say that questions about sex and income are the most likely to elicit a “no comment” or “none of your business.”
For the tough cases, people who say they’re too busy to talk, the center has a special team of “refusal converters” who use their personal brands of smooth talk to get people to answer truthfully on the phone.
One of the “converters,” Doris Barnett, 42, has a voice so motherly that she could talk a toddler out of a head-pounding tantrum. (In fact, her day job is running a day-care center for 2- and 3-year-olds.)
Unlike the little boys and girls whom she can manage easily, Barnett says her hardest cases have been university professors who are “extremely busy and very arrogant” and don’t have time for a telephone survey of college faculty now under way at the center.
Barnett’s secret for getting snooty profs and harried homemakers to answer the questions: “Stroking egos. That’s very important.”
Survey director Smith says that while O.J. polls will come and go, the surveys at the University of Chicago will endure.
When a pollster asks “headline-tied” questions like whether Simpson should be executed if convicted, Smith already knows that blacks will say “no” more often than whites.
The center’s surveys over many years have shown that African-Americans believe that capital punishment is unfairly applied to blacks more often than whites.
Says Smith: “Ninety-nine percent of our questions are just as relevant today as they were 20 years ago.”
