Opinion polls are by far one of the most used tools in the areas of politics, advertising, and market research. The use of polls within the context of a political campaign, the Gallup and Harris polls for instance, is the way in which most Americans become familiar with this type of research. Although polls are far from infallible, there is little doubt that their use has some value. As a leading research scholar said, "However partial, misleading or inconclusive polls may be as indicators of public opinion, they are better than anything else we've got" ("The," 1988, p. 1). Polls take on particular significance in Presidential election years, witnessed most recently by the 1988 campaign in which both Vice President George Bush and Governor Michael Dukakis made extensive use of polls as an indicator of public views. Nevertheless, opinion polls have been severely criticized as biased, misleading, and inaccurate.
The use of opinion polls as a tool in market research began in the early 1900s. In 1911, the Battle Creek, Michigan based company of Kellogg, along with 50 other national advertisers, initiated a post card survey of magazine readership. This began the science of market research (Boorstin, 1973, p. 153).
By the 1930s, the technique of using public opinion polls was being applied to political and social issues. Market researcher Elmo Roper's polls first appeared in Fortune magazine in 1935. That same year George Gallup founded the American Institute of Public Opinion, which began releasing its "Gallup Poll" to sponsoring newspapers (Landers, 1988, p. 456).
Of course, pollsters were not always accurate. Gallup, among others, incorrectly predicted the 1948 Presidential victor to be Republican candidate Thomas E. Dewey, rather than President Harry S. Truman. However, despite its occasional inaccuracy, the polling industry embedded itself deeply within American society, forever changing the nature of "public op...