NATIONAL ELITE SURVEYS: SOME EXPERIENCE FROM NORWAY.

Various problems involved in gaining access to national elites, conducting structured interviews with them, and gathering interview data on elite ideology and social structure are discussed in light of the growing use of survey techniques in research on national elites. The discussion is based on the authors' experiente conducting survey interviews with 124 members of Norwegian business, labor union, political, and civil servant elites during 1969. This experiente is quantified and otherwise reported to show ways by which various methodological obstacles in national elite surveys can be reduced. While such surveys are seen to be quite feasible and useful, several problems are of sufficient magnitude to warrant considerable caution and modesty in the claims made for data collected thereby. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]