OPINION POLLS AND MASS-OBSERVATION.

It is no coincidence that Mass-Observation and the British Institute of Public Opinion (BIPO) were founded in the same year, 1937. Although equally underfunded in their early years, their coming into existence reflected a desire within the liberal democracies to measure what ordinary people believed in an increasingly complex modern world threatened by the spread of fascist and totalitarian regimes across Europe and beyond. Their initial marginality was confirmed by the status of their leaders. In the case of BIPO, Henry Durant was an unemployed doctoral student. Mass-Observation was begun by Tom Harrisson, an unorthodox amateur anthropologist and ornithologist; Charles Madge, a poet and later sociologist; and the surrealist artist and later film-maker, Humphrey Jennings. A further parallel was provided by a strong American influence. In 1935 George Horace Gallup had created the American Institute of Public Opinion, which was the model for its British equivalent. Mass-Observation owed much to the "Chicago School" of sociology, which had since the First World War pioneered the study of life-story writing of individuals in groups such as Polish peasants and other immigrant groups settling in America. In spite of these similarities, however, there were also profound differences in approach between BIPO and Mass-Observation as well as within the latter itself.

The founders of Mass-Observation were united in their desire to empower ordinary people "to speak for themselves" by producing an anthropology "of ourselves, for ourselves" (Calder and Sheridan). They believed that the modern mass media did not reflect the views of ordinary people and that as Europe was heading for a catastrophic civil war it was essential to connect people with each other and ensure that the government reflect the real views of its population. Nevertheless, there was tension between Harrisson, who believed that popular ethnographic fieldwork was the way to understand the "tribes of Britain," and Madge and Jennings, who were more interested in the collective subconscious of the British people as revealed in writing and everyday discourse. One of the shared errors of these remarkably precocious individuals (all were in their twenties and had no financial resources) was their claim to be scientific, a claim that many of their contemporaries, especially in the newly emerging discipline of sociology, utterly disputed.

By the outbreak of the Second World War, Jennings had already left Mass-Observation, and Madge was to do so shortly after, mainly in disagreement over Harrisson's decision to work for the government and its home intelligence unit to monitor public morale. Ironically, in terms of approach Harrisson had moved closer to the position of his cofounders and increasingly put emphasis on written material—war diaries and directives—and acknowledging that qualitative evidence was of much more importance than quantitative. Even when Mass-Observation did quantify its findings, it did so on material that was part of a far less structured approach than BIPO, which asked questions on a "yes/no" basis.

The Second World War was the point of the original Mass-Observation's greatest influence, and the methodology employed by Harrisson was vindicated by his successful prediction of a massive Labour Party landslide in the 1945 election. In contrast, BIPO and opinion polls remained marginal in the 1940s. While the approach of BIPO was ultimately to become dominant, and Mass-Observation was to fade away in the late 1940s (but to be revived successfully at the University of Sussex in the 1980s, reviving diary, directive, and other life-story writing), it should not be assumed that the latter was an intellectual failure. In spite of its title, Mass-Observation increasingly believed in taking the individual seriously, and the huge archive it created revealed the complex and multilayered responses and reactions of ordinary people in their everyday lives to the world around them. The Mass-Observation Archive remains the most intimate and powerful evocation of the public mood during the Second World War.

The contrast in approaches between Mass-Observation and BIP Ocame to ahead in a public debate between Harrisson and Durant in 1942 at the British Psychology Society (and published in Nature, 9 May 1942). Durant stressed that "The history of science indicates that progress is most rapid when there is the most vigorous insistence upon exact statistical measurement" and that the social scientist had to be able to eliminate "subjective bias." In response, Harrisson argued that quantitative research was only useful as a "check, corrective and extension of the qualitative approach," and he rejected instant interviewing of large numbers of people, as carried out by BIPO and its successors, because it was done out of context and without any consideration of the relationship between interviewer and interviewee. In this respect, Mass-Observation was the precursor of the increasingly self-reflexive anthropology of the post-1945 era, the "thick description" urged by Clifford Geertz and the more tentative approach toward "truth" adopted by many postmodernists. At the time, however, Mass-Observation's influence was limited to sympathetic individual researchers on both sides of the Atlantic. The contemporary impact of Gallup's work in the United States was much greater, as is evidenced not only by BIPO but also the formation of the Institut Français d'Opinion Publique (IFOP) in 1938. The German occupation forced IFOP underground, but it was revived in 1944 after Liberation. The use of publicly accessible opinion polls was anathema to fascist regimes. Nevertheless, in both Nazi Germany and Vichy France, underground political resistance groups carried out informal polls, true to the democratic and antifascist objectives of those who pioneered the open gauging of public opinion.

See alsoPostmodernism.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Calder, Angus, and Dorothy Sheridan, eds. Speak for Yourself: A Mass-Observation Anthology, 1937–1949. London, 1984.

Madge, Charles, and Tom Harrisson. "Mass-Observation." Nature 149, no. 3784 (9 May 1942): 516–518.

Secondary Sources

Dorsey, John. "Public Opinion Research in France." Public Opinion Quarterly 16, no. 2 (summer 1952): 225–235.

Kushner, Tony. We Europeans?: Mass-Observation, "Race," and British Identity in the Twentieth Century. Aldershot, England, and Burlington, Vt., 2004.

Sheridan, Dorothy, Brian Street, and David Bloome. Writing Ourselves: Mass-Observation and Literacy Practices. Cresskill, N.J., 2000.

Worcester, Robert. British Public Opinion: A Guide to the History and Methodology of Political Opinion Polling. Oxford, U.K., 1991.

Tony Kushner