The Meaning of Opinion.

The authors try to find out what a respondent's answer to a public opinion interviewer really means. To know this one must examine some of the assumptions behind opinion polling, and must also identify the different meanings which identical responses may have to different groups of people. Finally, one must find ways to relate these responses to character structure, if one has to attempt to predict political or other behavior. The authors test few assumptions, which underlie polling. The scientific study of public opinion is in the hands of neither the poll-takers nor the respondents: both are caught in an historical process, which has not only set the questions to be investigated but also the form of the answer. The authors attempt to describe some of the different ways people approach the problem of having and giving an opinion. While the article groups these different ways roughly according to class, the various types, the authors describe can probably be found, in varying degrees, in all classes. As one goes down the status ladder, one still finds an astonishingly high proportion of response on polls, both in permitting oneself to be interviewed and in having an opinion that can be fitted, without too much gerrymandering, into the dimensions of current polling work. Even the lower class participates in this "conversation between the classes." The authors probe if the elections change the things. Latent meaning may be understood if we grasp the socially structured interpersonal situation between poller and pollee, and search it for the residues, verbal and non-verbal, which flow in our haste we throw away.