THE ACCURACY OF THE IMPRESSIONS OF SURVEY INTERVIEWERS.

This article focuses on the accuracy of impressions of survey interviewers. Many large U.S. universities publish a magazine, usually a monthly, which is intended as a "house organ" for the faculty and employees. In connection with a course in public opinion, the author recently supervised the conducting by students in the course of a survey of the opinions of the recipients of one such magazine, which will be called here the Bugle. The magazine is sent to all academic and nonacademic employees and has a circulation of about 6,000. The Bugle survey was summarized for the control group. They discussed the planning, the sampling, the questionnaire construction, the three methods of data collection, etc. About two hours were devoted to familiarize them with the survey, including examination of the blank questionnaires. Each person made 24 percentage estimates, the mean percentage error of estimate was smaller for the control class than for the interviewers, indicating rough equality of accuracy. The above suggests the possibility that the so-called "estimates" are merely wild guesses, bearing little relationship to the survey results.