The Genealogy of Public Opinion Polling

Public opinion polling has a long pedigree, and wars, politics, business, and humanitarianism have all been incentives to its development. Its ancestry includes philosophers and social scientists who contributed to the definition of public opinion, which had to be conceptualized before it could be measured. Landowners and social reformers are among those who worked on the methods of social surveys. Journalists, psychologists, and sociologists contributed to the fashioning of questionnaires. Sampling theory was developed by astronomers, mathematicians, and economists, while the methods of data analysis were devised by statisticians, psychologists, and sociologists. All this, when coupled with modern technology, makes polling an indispensable tool of politics, business, and the mass media today.