‘The Great Fiasco’ of the 1948 presidential election polls: status recognition and norms conflict in social science.
All three ‘scientific’ pollsters (Crossley, Gallup and Roper) wrongly predicted incumbent President Harry Truman’s defeat in the 1948 presidential election, and thus faced a potentially serious legitimacy crisis. This ‘fiasco’ occurred at a most inopportune time. Social science was embroiled in a po...
| Publicado en: | Annals of Science Vol. 75; no. 2; pp. 120 - 145 |
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| Formato: | Artículo |
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Taylor & Francis Ltd
Apr2018
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| Acceso en línea: | Ver este registro en EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=hlh&AN=130076849&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: hlh uiTerm: 130076849 longDbName: Humanities International Complete uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: jinfo: jid: 00033790 7J1 jtl: Annals of Science issn: 00033790 maglogo: Y pubinfo: dt: Apr2018 vid: 75 iid: 2 pid: 377 pub: Taylor & Francis Ltd artinfo: ui: 130076849 10.1080/00033790.2018.1466194 ppf: 120 ppct: 25 formats: fmt: – @attributes: type: T – @attributes: type: P size: 1.7MB tig: atl: ‘The Great Fiasco’ of the 1948 presidential election polls: status recognition and norms conflict in social science. aug: au: Lusinchi, Dominic affil: Department of Business, Technology and Engineering, University of California, Berkeley, USA su: United States presidential election, 1948 Social sciences Truman, Harry S., 1884-1972 Legitimacy of governments Social science research sug: subj: United States presidential election, 1948 Social sciences Truman, Harry S., 1884-1972 Legitimacy of governments Social science research ab: All three ‘scientific’ pollsters (Crossley, Gallup and Roper) wrongly predicted incumbent President Harry Truman’s defeat in the 1948 presidential election, and thus faced a potentially serious legitimacy crisis. This ‘fiasco’ occurred at a most inopportune time. Social science was embroiled in a policy debate taking place in the halls of Congress. It was fighting a losing battle to be included, along with the natural sciences, in the National Science Foundation, for which legislation was being drafted. Faced with the failure of the polls, the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) intervened quickly to prevent social science’s adversaries from using this event to degrade further its status. After all, many social scientists considered the sample survey as the paramount tool of social research, and sampling as one of social science’s greatest innovation. Concurrently, there was an ongoing conflict among polling practitioners themselves—between advocates of probability sampling and users of quotas, like the pollsters. The SSRC committee appointed to evaluate the polling debacle managed to keep this contentious issue of sampling from becoming the centre of attention. Given the inauspicious environment in which this event happened, the SSRC did not wish to advertise the fact that the house of social science was in turmoil. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: Article src: R language: English refInfo: copyright: @attributes: flag: Y custom: Copyright of Annals of Science is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites without the copyright holder's express written permission. Additionally, content may not be used with any artificial intelligence tools or machine learning technologies. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. item: Annals of Science holder: Taylor & Francis Ltd dt: @attributes: year: 2018 holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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