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International Journal of Public Opinion Research Advance Access originally published online on February 4, 2008
International Journal of Public Opinion Research 2008 20(1):3-22; doi:10.1093/ijpor/edn001
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© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The World Association for Public Opinion Research. All rights reserved.

The Use of Opinion Polls

What Polls Can and Cannot Tell us About Public Opinion: Keynote Speech at the 60th Annual Conference of WAPOR

Kurt Lang

Address correspondence to Kurt Lang, Sociology and Communication, University of Washingtion, Seattle, WA 98112, USA, E-mail: lang@u.washington.edu

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

What are the things that polls can and cannot tell us about public opinion? I am fully aware that merely to raise the question before this audience is to invite the kind of controversy academics live by. More concretely, the subject I want to address, one that has long been of interest to me and to Gladys Engel Lang,1 my co-worker, concerns the limits of opinion surveys as an instrument for empowering the public. ‘Giving the people voice’ was the vision that motivated the pioneers of our profession and has served as the basis for the legitimacy claimed by their many distinguished successors ever since. Indeed, a great deal of effort has gone into improving the techniques for ascertaining just what individuals think about their government, its leaders, its policies, and its achievements. As a consequence, those looking for guidance from ‘public opinion’ are no longer in quite the ‘same . . . [Full Text of this Article]


   POPULAR SOVEREIGNTY
 

   PUBLIC OPINION AS COLLECTIVE BEHAVIOR
 
MASS BEHAVIOR
CROWD ACTION
COLLECTIVE ADVOCACY

   TOWARD AN EXPANDED VIEW OF PUBLIC OPINION
 

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