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A COMM-ORG Working Paper, revised November 1997
COMMUNITY ORGANIZING OR ORGANIZING
COMMUNITY?
GENDER AND THE CRAFTS OF EMPOWERMENT
Susan Stall
Department of Sociology
Northeastern Illinois University
5500 N. St. Louis Ave.
Chicago, IL 60625
773-794-2997
s-stall1@neiu.edu
Randy Stoecker
Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social
Work
University of Toledo
Toledo, OH 43606
419-530-4975
rstoeck@pop3.utoledo.edu
Co-Authors
This paper is adapted from presentations at the annual meetings of the
Midwest Sociological Society, and the American Sociological Association, and
COMM-ORG: The On-Line Conference on Community Organizing and Development.
ABSTRACT
This paper looks at two strains of urban community organizing,
distinguished by philosophy and often by gender, and influenced by the
historical division of American society into public and private spheres. We
compare the well-known Alinsky model, which focuses on communities organizing
for power, and what we call the women-centered model, which focuses on
organizing relationships to build community. These models are rooted in
somewhat distinct traditions and vary along several dimensions, including
conceptions of human nature and conflict, power and politics, leadership, and
the organizing process. We conclude by examining the implications of each model
in the current socioeconomic context and the potential for their integration.
INTRODUCTION
Despite a rich and proud heritage of
female organizers and movement leaders, the field of community organization, in
both its teaching models and its major exponents, has been a male-dominated
preserve, where, even though values are expressed in terms of participatory
democracy, much of the focus within the dominant practice methods has been
nonsupportive or antithetical to feminism. Strategies have largely been based
on "macho-power" models, manipulativeness, and zero- sum gamesmanship
(Weil l986, 192).
The WOMAN in woman organizer is
important....It stands for a growing awareness of different tactics and
techniques, and maybe even a growing awareness of unique goals (Education
Center for Community Organizing [ECCO] 1989, 15).
Behind every successful social movement is a community, or a network of
communities. The community behind the movement provides many things. It
sustains the movement during the hard times, when the movement itself is in
abeyance (Taylor, 1989). It provides for the social reproduction needs of
movement participants, providing things as basic as childcare so parents can
participate in movement events (Stoecker, 1992). It provides a free space
(Evans and Boyte, 1986) where members can practice "prefigurative
politics" (Breines, 1989), attempting to create on a small scale the type
of world they are struggling for.
These communities do not just happen. They must be organized. Someone
has to build strong enough relationships between people so they can support
each other through long and sometimes dangerous social change struggles. Or, if
the community already exists, someone has to help transform it to support
political action. Sometimes that requires reorganizing the community (Alinsky,
1971) by identifying individuals who can move the community to action.
This process of building a mobilizable community is called
"community organizing." It involves "the craft" of building
an enduring network of people, who identify with common ideals, and who can
engage in social action on the basis of those ideals. In practice, it is much
more than micromobilization or framing strategy (Snow et al., 1986.). Community
organizing can in fact refer to the entire process of organizing relationships,
identifying issues, mobilizing around those issues, and maintaining an enduring
organization. The distinction between community organizing and social movement
is that community organizing is localized, often "pre-political"
action, while social movements are multi-local. Consider, for a moment that we
speak of the Civil Rights "Movement," or even the "sit-in
movement," but not the "Montgomery Bus Boycott movement" (whose
community was organized long before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat).
The distinction is subtle but important. One of the most common
definitions of social movement, by Charles Tilly (1984) says that a social
movement is a "sustained series of actions between power holders and
persons successfully claiming to speak on behalf of a constituency lacking
formal representation, in the course of which those persons make publicly
visible demands for changes in the distribution of exercise of power, and back
those with public demonstrations of support." A general definition of
community organizing, on the other hand, says that "community organizing
is the process of building power that includes people with a problem in
defining their community, defining the problems that they wish to address, the
solutions they wish to pursue, and the methods they will use to accomplish
their solutions. The organization will identify the people and structures that
need to be part of these solutions, and, by persuasion or confrontation,
negotiate with them to accomplish the goals of the community. In the process,
organizations will build a democratically controlled community institution -
the organization - that can take on further problems and embody the will and
power of that community over time." (Beckwith, Stoecker, and McNeely,
1997) In general, Community organizing is the work that occurs in local
settings to empower individuals, build relationships, and create action for
social change (Bobo et al, 1991; Kahn, 1991, Beckwith and Lopez, 1997).
Both of these definitions emphasize the action part of making change.
Both talk about moving people to put pressure on authorities to make that
change. But in community organizing the focus is on the community, while in
social movements the focus is on the movement. These are different levels of
action. Community organization is the process that builds a constituency that
can go on to create a movement, and it occurs at a level between the
micro-mobilization of individuals (Snow et al, 1986) and the "political
process" of the broader social system (McAdam, 1982). It is the formation
of local movement centers like the Montgomery Improvement Association, which
helped lead the famed Montgomery Bus Boycott (Morris, 1984) and ultimately provided
the impetus for a national Civil Rights Movement.
The community is more than just the informal backstage relationships
between movement members (Buechler, 1990; 1993), or the foundation for social
movement action. The community relationships which sustain movement activists
may, in fact, include many people who are not involved in the movement at all
(Stoecker, 1995). In community organizing, the focus is on broadening the
convergence between the social movement and the community. This is also why
community organizing occurs much more as local phenomena--since it has
historically focused on building a "localized social movement" in
places as small as a single neighborhood (Stoecker, 1993). Viewing social
movements as the outcome of community organizing processes can stand social
movement analysis on its head, showing how "leaders are often mobilized by
the masses they will eventually come to lead" (Robnett l996,1664).
Community organizing has scantly been studied by scholars until very
recently (see COMM-ORG, 1997) and even then not by social movement scholars.
The Montgomery Bus Boycott is the most cited example--and it has rarely, until
quite recently, been covered as community organizing (Payne,1989; Robnett
1996). Rather, social movement concepts such as micromobilization and frame
analysis have been used to dissect community organizing, fragmenting it. The
community organizing done by the famous Saul Alinsky is barely mentioned in the
social movements literature, and when it is, there are only weak connections to
broader social movement theories (Reitzes and Reitzes, 1987; 1987b). As a
consequence, we know very little about whether the concepts and theories
developed to study large scale social movements apply to community organizing
or whether we need new concepts altogether (Stoecker, 1993).
Added to the neglect within the social movements literature of community
organizing is our lack of understanding of the role that gender structures and
identities play in social movements. Gender as a variable in social movements
has only recently received much attention (Bookman and Morgen l988; Barnett
l993, 1995; Caldwell 1994; McAdam 1989; Stoecker, 1992; Robnett l996; Thompson
l994; Tracy l994; Wekerle l996; West and Blumberg l990). Yet, the
organizational structure and practices of social movement organizations and
actors are not gender neutral. Due to the social consequences of sex-category
membership--the differential allocation of power and resources-- "doing
gender is unavoidable"(West and Zimmerman l987, 126). Gender, as a social
product of everyday actions and interactional work, is also produced and
reproduced through social movement activities. Within social movements, doing
gender legitimates differences and inequities in the sexual division of labor
and creates and sustains the differential evaluation of leadership and
organizing activities. Gender also effects problem identification and tactical
choices (Brandwein l987, 122). The male-dominated world of sports and the
military provide images and metaphors for building teamwork, and for igniting
competition and antagonism against opponents "to win" a particular
movement campaign (Acker, l990). The rhythm and timing of social movement work
often does not take into account the rhythms of life of caring work outside of
organizing meetings and campaigns (Stoecker, 1992). Or when it does, the result
is that women's movement involvement is restricted. In the New York Tenants
movement, women were restricted to the most grass-roots organizing activities,
while men did the negotiating (Lawson and Barton, 1980). In the 1960s Freedom
Summer campaign, organizers worried about the consequences of white women
recruits developing relationships with Black men in the South (McAdam, 1986).
As a consequence, the community organizing work that women do in social
movements is also neglected. Payne (1989), Barnett (1993, 1995) and Robnett
(l996) have challenged accounts of the civil rights movement that neglect the
central contributions of women activists. Barnett (l993, 165) challenges
research on modern social movement leadership that presents "the erroneous
image that `all of the women are white, all of the Blacks are men'" She
argues against the narrow definition of social movement leadership that
elevates the movement spokesperson, while neglecting the "leaders",
often women, who serve as grassroots organizers. Robnett (l996) analyzes how
the "gendered organization" of the civil rights movement defined the
social location of African-American women in the movement, creating a particular
substructure of leadership.
It is possible that community organizing is neglected for the same
reason that women's work in social movements has been neglected. Women's work
and community organizing are both, to an extent, invisible labor. What people
see is the flashy demonstration, not knowing the many hours of preparation
building relationships and providing for participants' basic needs that made
the demonstration possible. Indeed, community organizing is the part of social
movements that occurs closest to the grassroots and is in fact more often done
by women (Robnett, 1996; Lawson and Barton, 1980). Even when men, such as Saul
Alinsky, do it, it receives short shrift. And social movement analysis, with
some exception (Taylor, 1989; Taylor and Rupp, 1993; Taylor and Whittier, 1992;
Robnett, 1996; Stoecker, 1992) has scarcely developed concepts which would even
allow us to see this grassroots labor, far less understand it.
What are some of the gender dimensions that would help us understand
community organizing and its relationship to movement building? Our analysis
begins with the historical division of American culture into public and private
whperes that split the "public work done mostly by men in the formal
economy and government from the "private" work done mostly by women
in the community and home (Tilly and Scott, 1978). These spheres have always
influenced each other (through routes such as the economic impact of women's
unpaid domestic labor or the impact of economic policy changes on family quality
of life), but have historically been organized around different logics with
different cultures and, we argue, have produced two distinct models of
community organizing. These two community organizing modeld--one developed by
Saul Alinsky and the other developed by a wide variety or women--in fact begin
from opposite ends of the public-private split. The Alinsky model begins with
"community organizing"--the public sphere battles between the haves
and have-nots. The women-centered model begins with "organizing
community"--building relationships and empowering individuals through
those relationships.
The Alinsky model, which we name after its most famous practitioner, is
based in a conception of separate public and private spheres. Community
organizing was not a job for family types, a position he reinforced by his own
marital conflicts, by his demands on his trainees, and by his own poverty. In
fact, if anything, the main role of the private sphere was to support the
organizer's public sphere work. In his Rules for Radicals, Alinsky
(1971) remarked:
The marriage record of organizers is
with rare exception disastrous. Further, the tension, the hours, the home
situation, and the opportunities, do not argue for fidelity. Also, with rare
exception, I have not known really competent organizers who were concerned
about celibacy. Here and there are wives and husbands or those in love
relationships who understand and are committed to the work, and are real
sources of strength to the organizer (p. 65).
His attitude toward which issues were important also illustrates his
emphasis on the public sphere. While problems began in the private sphere, it
was important to move the community to understand how those problems were
connected to larger issues outside of the community. Thus, problems could not
be solved within the community but by the community being represented better in
the public sphere (Reitzes and Reitzes, 1987, pp.27-28). This is not to say
that Alinsky avoided a focus on private sphere issues. His first successful
organizing attempt, in Back of the Yards, produced a well-baby clinic, a credit
union, and a hot lunch program (Finks, 1984, p. 21). But these programs were
accomplished through public sphere strategizing, not private relationships. In
establishing and maintaining the hot lunch program, Alinsky pushed the BYNC to
understand its relationship to the national hot lunch program and "In
order to fight for their own Hot Lunch project they would have to fight for
every Hot Lunch project in every part of the United States." (Alinsky,
1969, p. 168).
The women-centered model, though it has a long history, has only
recently received much attention as some feminist researchers and organizers
began arguing for a theory of organizing that is feminist or "women-centered"
(Ackelsberg l988; Barnett l995; ECCO 1989; Gutierrez and Lewis 1992; Haywoode
l991; Weil l986; West and Blumberg l990). For the women-centered model, while
organizing efforts are rooted in private sphere issues or relationships, the
organizing process problematizes the split between public and private, since
its "activities which do not fall smoothly into either category"
(Tiano, l984, p. 21). Women's emotional attachments to their families affect
their everyday community commitments and their priorities about what are
appropriate targets for local social change efforts (Colfer and Colfer, 1978;
Genovese, 1980; Stoneall, 1981). But women-centered organizing extends
"the boundaries of the household to include the neighborhood" and, as
its efforts move ever further out, ultimately "dissolve[s] the boundaries
between public and private life, between household and civil society"
(Haywoode, l991, p. 175). Organizing to secure tenant rights, local daycares,
and youth programs "define a sphere which is public, yet closer to
home" (Haywoode, l991, p. 175) and demonstrates the importance of the
interconnections between the spheres (Ackelsberg, l988; Petchesky, l979).
Women-centered organizing utilizes "feminist" values, practices, and
goals. Within this type of organizing there is an emphasis on community
building, collectivism, caring, mutual respect, and self-transformation
(Barnett l995). As we will discuss, women-centered organizing is defined as
much by the historical placement of women in the home and neighborhood as the
Alinsky model is defined by the historical placement of men in public governing
and commerce.
In this paper, then, we address two neglected issues in one question:
How do gender structures and identities play out in community organizing? It would
be nice if we could just say that community organizing is the backstage women's
work of movement building. But the most famous of the community organizers,
Saul Alinsky, was a man, and one who was particularly fond of his masculine
style of community organizing (see below).
This paper attempts to understand the not-quite-social-movement world of
community organizing. We draw on U.S. examples across five decades utilizing
secondary sources and our own community-based research to compare the Alinsky
model and the women-centered model--which we see as two of the most important
strands of community organizing in the United States. Our purpose is not to
systematically test theories or evaluate the models. Rather, using a heuristic
approach, we want to begin exploring the possible dimensions across which these
two organizing models can be compared. Some authors have examined and critiqued
the Alinsky style of organizing (Lancourt 1979; Sherrard and Murray 1965; Stein
1986), and a few authors have argued that there is a distinct way of women's
organizing (ECCO l989; Haywoode l991; Oppenheim l991; Weil l986), but no one
has compared these two approaches.
These "models" are ideal type constructs and, we suspect, do
not occur as mutually exclusive in the real world. Indeed, many Alinsky
organizations have been reluctant to engage in public conflict (Lancourt l979;
Bailey 1972), and Alinsky followers such as Fred Ross, Cesar Chavez, and Ed
Chambers increasingly emphasized private sphere issues and family and community
relationship building (Reitzes and Reitzes l987a; Industrial Areas Foundation
l978). We also focus on the more traditional Alinsky-style organizing rather
than recent adaptations by groups like the IAF. Likewise, the women-centered
model has to-date not been portrayed as a model and thus its practitioners,
many of whom are trained in Alinsky-style organizing, are very diverse.
Instead, our purpose is to show two strains of influence on community
organizing.
We first examine the historical roots and some basic traits of each
tradition. Next, we explore some key differences between the two approaches. We
then discuss the implications of each model and the potential for integrating
them.
BACKGROUND OF THE ORGANIZING MODELS
The Alinsky Model
The very term "community organizing" is inextricably linked
with the late Saul Alinsky, whose community organizing career began in the late
1930s. As part of his field research job as a graduate student in criminology
at the University of Chicago he was to develop a juvenile delinquency program
in Chicago's "Back of the Yards," neighborhood downwind of the
Chicago Stockyards--a foul-smelling and crime-ridden slum of poor Poles,
Lithuanians, and Slovaks. When Alinsky arrived, the Congress of Industrial
Organizations was organizing the stockyard workers living there. Expanding the
CIO model beyond workplace issues, Alinsky organized the Back of the Yards
Neighborhood Council (BYNC) from local neighborhood groups, ethnic clubs, union
locals, bowling leagues, and an American Legion Post. The success of BYNC in
getting expanded city services and political power started Alinsky off on a
long career of organizing poor urban communities around the country (Finks
1984; Reitzes and Reitzes 1987a).
Alinsky's targets shot at him, threw him in jail, and linked him to
Communists, organized crime, and other "undesirables." He saw how the
"haves" blatantly took from the "have nots" and unashamedly
manipulated the consciousness of the "have a little, want mores."
Alinsky had little patience for the version of community organizing practiced
by social workers, saying "they organize to get rid of four-legged rats
and stop there; we organize to get rid of four-legged rats so we can get on to
removing two-legged rats" (Alinsky 1971, 68).
Alinsky often argued that a career as a community organizer had to come
before all else, including family, and to enforce this he would keep his
trainees up all hours of the night at meetings and discussions (Reitzes and
Reitzes, 1987, p. 10). Though he did not publicly discourage women from
engaging in the work (Alinsky, 1971), he was skeptical of women doing his kind
of community organizing, fearing they were too delicate (Finks, 1984).1
Heather Booth, who went on to help found the Midwest Academy and Citizen Action,
quit the Community Action Program of Alinsky's Industrial Areas Foundation
(IAF), believing that women received inadequate training from IAF and the IAF
wasn't sensitive to women's issues.
Alinsky's approach has influenced an entire generation of organizers who
adapted his principles, but retained a core of practices and assumptions we
will explore later. The practice of the Alinsky model has built powerful
organizations and produced visible victories across the country: Back of the
Yards and TWO in Chicago, SECO in Baltimore, FIGHT in Rochester, MACO in
Detroit, ACORN in Little Rock, ETCO in Toledo, and COPS in San Antonio, among
others. These organizations have in some cases saved entire communities from
destruction and produced influential leaders who have gone on to change the
face of the public sphere.
The Women-Centered Model
Unlike the Alinsky model, the women-centered model of community
organizing cannot be attributed to a single person or movement. Indeed, a wide
diversity of women have mobilized around many different issues using many
different methods. We are most interested in those mobilizations which fit the
community organizing definition of being locale-based.
This model can be traced back to African-American women's efforts to
sustain home and community under slavery. Bell hooks (l990; also see Davis
l981) notes the historic importance for African-Americans of
"homeplace" as a site to recognize and resist domination. Hooks
argues,
Historically, African-American people
believed that the construction of a homeplace, however fragile and tenuous (the
slave hut, the wooden shack), had a radical political dimension...it was about
the construction of a safe place where black people could affrim one another
and by so doing heal many of the wouunds inflicted by racist domination"
(l990 42).
Later, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
African-American women involved in the Black Women's Clubs organized day-care
centers, orphanages, and nursing homes. Others, such as Ida B. Wells, organized
campaigns around such issues as lynching and rape (Duster 1970; Giddings l984;
Gutierrez and Lewis l992).
Also important in understanding the historical roots of current
women-centered organizing efforts are Anglo women's "municipal
housekeeping" activities of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
"Then public spirited women, in attempting to overcome disapproval of
their public role...explain[ed] that they were only protecting their homes and
families by extending their activities from the home into the public arena.
Women claimed the right to be guardians of the neighborhood, just as they were
acknowledged to be guardians of the family"(Haywoode l991, l80). Since
then, women have created numerous voluntary and benevolent associations to campaign
for concrete reforms in local neighborhoods and broader reforms in municipal
services, education, labor, housing, health care, and childrens' rights (Berg
1978; Haywoode l991; Tax 1980).
Perhaps the most famous of these activities were the settlement houses,
founded primarily by college-educated white middle-class women who believed
they should live in the neighborhood wherethey worked (Bryan and Davis l990,
5). The most well-known settlement house organizer was Jane Addams, who with
Ellen Gates Starr founded Hull House on Chicago's west side in 1889. Their goal
was to improve the social networks, social services, and community life in
poverty-stricken immigrant slums. They succeeded in developing parks,
playgrounds, expanded community services, and neighborhood plans. They were
also involved in social reform movements promoting labor legislation for women
and children, care of delinquents, and women's suffrage. But community
organizers often saw them as engaging in charity work rather than adversarial social
action (Brandwein l981, l987; Finks 1984, 96-7), and clinical social workers
saw them as violating the detached casework method that emphasized individual
treatment over social reform and community development (Drew l983; Lee l937;
Specht and Courtney l994).
The women-centered model also carries a history of success different
from the Alinsky model. The activism of women in the early settlement movement,
the civil rights movement, and the consciousness-raising groups of the radical
branch of the 1970s women's movement allowed women to challenge both private
and public arrangements in ways that would forever effect their relationships,
housework, parenting practices, and career paths. The consequent changes in
women's health care and women's knowledge of their own bodies, in cultural
practices around dating and relationships, and the relationship between work
and family are still reverberating through society. That these successes have
not been better documented owes to the fact that struggles focused on the
private sphere have been neither defined nor valued as important. Today, women
of color, low-income, and working class women create and sustain numerous
protest efforts and organizations to alter living conditions or policies that
threaten their families and communities (Bookman and Morgen l988; Feldman and
Stall, 1994; Garland l988; Gilkes l988; Gutierrez and Lewis l992; Hamilton
l991; Haywoode l991; Leavitt 1993; McCourt l977; Rabrenovic l995). These
include, but are not limited to tenant organizing (Lawson and Barton l990), low
income housing (Breitbart and Pader l995; Feldman and Stall, 1994), welfare
rights (Naples l991), and environmental issues (Pardo l990).
COMPARING THE MODELS
Human Nature and Conflict
The Alinsky model and the women-centered model begin from different
starting points--the rough and tumble world of aggressive public sphere
confrontation; and the cooperative nurturant world of private sphere personal
and community development. Consequently, they have very different views of what
human nature is and its role in human conflict.
Among all the tenets of the Alinsky model, the assumption of
self-interest has the strongest continuing influence (Beckwith n.d.) and is
strongly influenced by the centrality of the public shpere in the Alinsky
model.. Modern society, from Alinsky's perspective, is created out of
compromise between self-interested individuals operating in the public sphere.
Thus, organizing people requires appealing to their self-interest. People
become involved because they think there is something in it for themselves
(Alinsky 1969, 94-98; 1971, 53-9). Alinsky's emphasis on self-interest was
connected to his wariness of ideology. From his perspective, organizing people
around abstract ideology leads to boredom at best and ideological disputes at
worst. Alinsky also feared ideology becoming dogma and was adamant that
building a pragmatic organization should come before promoting any ideology. He
did hope that, as the community became organized, the process would bring out "innate
altruism" and "affective commitment." But even that level of
commitment was based on building victories through conflict with targets
(Lancourt 1979, 51; Reitzes and Reitzes 1987a, 56; 1987b). Alinsky relates the
story of one organizer's effort to start a "people's organization"
and how he used self-interest to achieve the desired result:
Mr. David was a businessman who...had
avoided participation in any kind of social-betterment program or community
group....His whole manner let me know that in his opinion I was just another
`do-gooder' and as soon as I finished my song and dance he would give me a
dollar or two and wish me well. I suddenly shifted from my talk on the children
and began to point out indirectly the implications of his joining our organization....I
could almost hear Mr. David thinking..."And where could I get better
business relations than at this meeting." Then David turned to me and said
"I'll be at that meeting tonight." Immediately after I left David I
went across the street to Roger, who is in the same business, and I talked to
him the same way. Roger had a doubled-barreled incentive for coming. First
there was David's purpose and secondly Roger wanted to make sure that David
would not take away any part of his business (Alinsky 1969, 95-97).
Since Alinsky saw society as a compromise between competing
self-interested individuals, conflict was inevitable, and a pluralist polity
was the means by which compromise was reached. Since poor people are at an
initial disadvantage in that polity, the organizer's job is to prepare citizens
to engage in the level of public conflict necessary for them to be included in
the compromise process (Reitzes and Reitzes 1987a). Alinsky contended that the
only way to overcome the inertia that exists in most communities (Reitzes and
Reitzes 1987a, 70) was to "rub raw the resentments of the people in the
community" (Alinsky 1971, 116). In order to engage in the level of battle
necessary to win, "the rank and file and the smaller leaders of the
organizations must be whipped up to a fighting pitch" (Alinsky 1969, 151).
Alinsky would engage small-scale conflicts within communities against
unscrupulous merchants, realtors, and even entrenched community organizations,
to build victories and a sense of power (Reitzes and Reitzes 1987a, 54, 65),
treating even the relatively private sphere of the neighborhood as a public
sphere arena. Alinsky's involvement in 1960s Rochester with FIGHT, pressing for
Kodak to support an affirmative hiring and jobs program, is illustrative. FIGHT
began with a drawn-out negotiation process, and then Alinsky escalated to
confrontational rhetoric and pickets. When Kodak reneged on a signed agreement,
Alinsky and FIGHT organized a proxy campaign for Kodak's annual meeting. Forty
members of FIGHT and Friends of FIGHT attended the meeting, demanded that Kodak
reinstate its original agreement by 2 pm, and then walked out to 800 supporters
in the street. They came back at 2 pm and were told Kodak would not reverse its
position. The FIGHT leadership came out and told the crowd: "Racial War
has been declared on black communities by Kodak. If it's war they want, war
they'll get." Threats of a major demonstration in July and further
escalation of the conflict produced a behind the scenes agreement at the
eleventh hour (Finks 1984, 213-221).
Unlike the Alinsky model, women-centered organizing involvement does not
emanate from self-interest but from an ethic of care maintained by
relationships built on years of local volunteer work in the expanded private sphere,
particularly community associations (Stall, 1991). Rather than a morality of
individual rights, women learn a morality of responsibility that is connected
to relationships and is based on the "universality of the need for
compassion and care" (Gilligan l977: 509). Women-centered organizers grasp
the meaning of justice not as a compromise between self-interested individuals,
but as a practical reciprocity in the network of relationships that make up the
community (Ackelsberg l988; Haywoode 1991; Stall, 1991). Leavitt (l993)
describes how concern for their children's welfare led a group of
African-American women in Los Angeles in the late l980s to focus on rehabbing
the existing tot lots in their public housing development. In Nickerson
Gardens, as in public housing across the country, women make up the
overwhelming majority of grassroots organizers. The campaign of this all-women
tot-lot committee ignited them to testify at housing authority hearings,
conduct a community survey, and eventually secure funds and participate in the
design and the construction of two play areas in their low-income community.
They did not manipulate self-interest but instead built a cooperative
consensus.
Within the women-centered model, the maintenance and development of social
cohesion--personal connections with others that provide a safe environment for
people to develop, change and grow--is more immediately important than conflict
to gain institutional power (Kaplan l982). For women, community relationships
include the social fabric created through routine activities related to the
private sphere, such as childcare, housekeeping, and shopping (DeVault l991),
as well as through social arrangements they make to protect, enhance, and
preserve the cultural experience of community members (Bernard l981, Stoneall
l983). Historically, women have relied on community networks to feed, clothe,
and shelter their families (Sacks 1988a, 21; also see Hill Collins l990).
Particularly for women, communal structures can serve as "free spaces"
offering arenas outside of the family where women can develop a "growing
sense that they [have] the right to work -- first in behalf of others, then in
behalf of themselves" (Evans and Boyte l981, 61; l986).
Women residents of the Wentworth Gardens Chicago public housing
development in Chicago, in 1968, created and now continue to manage their own
laundromat which provides both on-site laundry facilities and a community space
that serves as a primary recruitment ground for community activists. The ongoing
volunteer work of women residents over four decades has assured the
laundromat's continued success, and has helped numerous women develop skills
and self-confidence to further develop the community through the opening of an
on-site grocery store and obtaining other improvements to their housing. A
Resident Service Committee, made up of laundromat volunteers, meets monthly to
resolve problems and allocate laundromat profits to annual community festivals,
scholarship funds, and other activities.
Power and Politics
Both models have seemingly inconsistent understandings of power and
politics. These inconsistencies are rooted partly in the ways each thinks about
human nature, but are also particularly affected by how they deal with the
public-private split. The Alinsky model sees power as zero-sum, but the polity
as pluralist. The women-centered model sees power as infinitely expanding, but
the polity as structurally biased. Understanding both the differences between
the models, and their seeming inconsistencies, requires looking at how each
deals with the public-private split.
For the Alinsky model, power and politics both occur in the public
sphere. When power is zero-sum, the only way to get more is to take it from
someone else. Alinsky was adamant that real power could not be given, but only
taken. He watched how obsessed elites were with power, even taking it from each
other when they could and thus making the very structure of power zero-sum.
Thus, the method for a poor community to gain power was through public sphere
action--by picking a single elite target, isolating it from other elites,
personalizing it, and polarizing it (Alinsky 1971).2 The 1960s
Woodlawn Organization (TWO) was one of Alinsky's most famous organizing
projects in an African American neighborhood on Chicago's south side. When TWO
was shut out of urban renewal planning for their neighborhood, they
commissioned their own plan, and threatened to occupy Lake Shore Drive during
rush hour unless their plan held sway. Not only did they get agreement on a
number of their plan proposals, they also controlled a new committee to approve
all future plans for their neighborhood, shifting control of urban planning
from city hall to the neighborhood (Finks, l984, 153; Reitzes and Reitzes,
1987)).
In women-centered organizing, power begins in the private sphere of
relationships, and thus is not conceptualized as zero-sum, but as limitless and
collective. "Co-active power" is based on human interdependence and
the development of all within the group or the community through collaboration
(Follet l940; see also Hartsock l974). "[I]t belongs to a group and
remains in existence only so long as the group keeps together" (Arendt
l969, 44). The goal of a women-centered organizing process is empowerment (ECCO
l989). Empowerment is a developmental process that includes building skills
through repetitive cycles of action and reflection which evoke new skills and
understandings, which in turn provoke new and more effective actions (Keiffer
l984). Empowerment includes the development of a more positive self-concept and
self-confidence; a more critical world view; and the cultivation of individual
and collective skills and resources for social and political action (Rappaport
l986; Van Den Bergh and Cooper l986; Weil l986). In the case of the Cedar
Riverside Project Area Committee, an organization dedicated to planning
resident-controlled redevelopment of a counter-culture Minneapolis
neighborhood, tensions developed in the 1980s between those who emphasized
building power as an outcome and empowering residents as a process. One woman
organizer compares her approach to that of the lead organizer:
I disagree with Tim, but he's a very
empowering person. Tim is more Alinsky. For me, the process, not the outcome,
is the most important.... The empowerment of individuals is why I became
involved.... I was a single mother looking for income, and was hired as a block
worker for the dispute resolution board, and gained a real sense of
empowerment.
Power, for this organizer, is gained not through winning a public sphere
battle, but by bringing residents together to resolve disputes and build
relationships within their own community.
When we shift the focus from more abstract notions of power to more
concrete practices of politics, both models are forced to work in the public
sphere. But the public sphere-private sphere split still influences how each
relates to politics.
The Alinsky model sees itself as already in the public sphere, and as a
consequence already part of the political system. The problem was not gaining
access--the rules of politics already granted access. Rather, the problem was
effectively organizing to make the most of that access. Alinsky believed that
poor people could form their own interest group and access the polity just like
any other interest group. They may have to make more of a fuss to be recognized
initially, but once recognized, their interests would be represented just like
anyone else's. Community organizing, for Alinsky, was bringing people together to
practice democracy. Consequently, Alinsky did not see a need for dramatic
structural adjustments. The system was, in fact, so good that it would protect
and support the have-nots in organizing against those elites who had been
taking unfair advantage (Alinsky l969; Lancourt l979, 31-35; Reitzes and
Reitzes 1987, 17-18). Alinsky organizations support government even while
attacking office holders (Bailey 1972, 136). When the IAF-trained Ernesto
Cortez returned to San Antonio to help found Communities Organized for Public
Service (COPS) in 1973, he began with the traditional strategy of escalating
from negotiations to protests to achieve better city services for Latino
communities. Soon after their initial successes, COPS turned to voter
mobilization, eventually resulting in a slim win to change San Antonio's
council from at-large to district representation. From there they were able to
control half of the council's seats, bringing over half of the city's federal
Community Development Block Grant funds to COPS projects from 1974-1981.
Eventually COPS found that its political lobbying and voter mobilization
tactics outpaced the effectiveness of confrontation and protest (Reitzes and
Reitzes 1987a, 121-123). Heather Booth's Citizen Action project has taken this
pluralist organizing approach to its logical extreme, focusing her energies
entirely on voter mobilization in cities and states around the country (Reitzes
and Reitzes l987a, 153).
The women-centered model, however, approaches politics from an
experience and consciousness of the exclusionary qualities of the
public-private sphere split, which becomes embedded in a matrix of domination
along structural axes of gender, race, and social class and hides the
signficance of women's work in local settings. This matrix has historically
excluded women from public sphere politics, and restricted them through the
sexual division of labor to social reproduction activities centered in the home
(Cockburn l977; Kaplan l982, 545). Increasingly, women have politicized the private
sphere as a means to combat exclusion from the public agenda (Kaplan l982).
Thus, women have organized around issues that flow from their distinct
histories, every day experiences, and perspectives (Ackelsberg 1988; Bookman
and Morgen l988; ECCO 1989; Haywoode l991; Stall, 1991; West and Blumberg l990;
Wilson l977). Women-centered organizing "dissolve[s] the boundaries
between public and private life, between household and civil society" and
extends "the boundaries of the household to include the neighborhood"
(Haywoode l991, 175). Organizing to secure local daycares, youth programs,
tenant rights and a clean environment "define a sphere which is public,
yet closer to home" (Haywoode l991, 175) and demonstrates the importance
of the interconnections between the spheres (Ackelsberg l988; Petchesky l979).
Cynthia Hamilton (l99l), a community organizer in South Central Los Angeles,
described a primarily women-directed organizing campaign to stop the solid
waste incinerator planned for their community in the late l980s. These low
income women, primarily African-American, with no prior political experience,
were motivated by the health threat to their homes and children. They built a
loose, but effective organization, the Concerned Citizens of South Central Los
Angeles, and were gradually joined by white, middle-class, and professional
women from across the city. The activists began to recognize their shared
gender oppression as they confronted the sarcasm and contempt of male political
officials and industry representatives--who dismissed their human concerns as
"irrational, uninformed, and disruptive" (44)--and restrictions on
their organizing created by their family's needs. Eventually they forced
incinerator industry representatives to compromise and helped their families
accept a new division of labor in the home to accommodate activists' increased
public political participation.3
Leadership Development
Leadership is another characteristic of these models that shows the
influence of the public-private split. The Alinsky model maintains and explicit
between public sphere leaders, called "organizers," and private
sphere community leaders who occupy decision-making positions in formal
community organizations. For the women centered model, leadership begins in the
private sphere, but leadership becomes a form of boundary spanning across
public and private spheres.
For Alinsky, the organizer is a professional consultant from outside the
community whose job is to get people to adopt a delegitimizing frame (Ferree and
Miller 1985; Gamson et al. 1982;) that breaks the power structure's hold over
them (Bailey 1972, 46-7). Advocates of the Alinsky approach contend that
organizing is a very complex task requiring professional-level training and
experience (Bailey 1972, 137; Reitzes and Reitzes 1987a, 53). In many cases
organizers must "disorganize" or reorganize the community since so
many communities are organized for apathy (Alinsky 1971, 116; Bailey 1972, 50).
The Alinsky model also maintains a strict role separation between outside
organizers and the indigenous leaders that organizers are responsible for
locating and supporting (Lancourt 1979; Reitzes and Reitzes 1987b). New leaders
have to be developed, often outside of the community's
institutionally-appointed leadership structure. The focus is not on those
individuals, however, but on building a strong organization and getting
material concessions from elites. Organizers have influence, but only through
their relationships with indigenous leaders (Lancourt 1979). It may appear
curious that Alinsky did not emphasize building indigenous organizers,
especially since the lack of indigenous organizing expertise often led to
organizational decline after the pros left (Lancourt 1979).4 Tom
Gaudette, an Alinsky-trained organizer who helped build the Organization for a
Better Austin (OBA) in Chicago, explicitly discouraged his organizers from
living in the neighborhood, arguing they had to be able to view the community
dispassionately in order to be effective at their job (Bailey 1972, 80). But
when viewed through the lens of the public-private split, it is clear that the
organizers are leaders who remain in the public sphere, always separate from
the expanded private sphere of community. Because the organizers remain in the
public sphere, they become the link that pulls private sphere leaders, and
their communities, in to public action.
There is less separation between organizers and leaders in the
women-centered model, as women-centered organizers, rather than being
outsiders, are more often rooted in local networks. they are closely linked to
those with whom they work and organize and act as mentors or facilitators of
the empowerment process.5 Private sphere issues seem paramount with
these organizers. They find they need to deal with women's sense of
powerlessness and low self-esteem (Miller l986)--before they can effectively
involve them in sustained organizing efforts. Mentoring others as they learn
the organizing process is premised on the belief that all have the capacity to
be leaders /organizers. Rather than focusing on or elevating individual
leaders, women-centered organizers seek to model and develop "group
centered" leadership (Payne l989) that "embraces the participation of
many as opposed to creating competition over the elevation of only a few"
(ECCO l989, 16). Instead of moving people and directing events, this is a
conception of leadership as teaching (Payne l989).6 Analyses of
women-centered organizing and leadership development efforts also underline the
importance of "centerwomen," or "bridge leaders," who use
existing local networks to develop social groups and activities that create a
sense of familial/community consciousness, connecting people with similar
concerns and heightening awareness of shared issues (Sacks l988b; Robnett,
1996). These leaders can transform social networks into a political force, and
demonstrate how the particular skills that women learn in their families and
communities (e.g., interpersonal skills, planning and coordination, conflict mediation)
can be translated into effective public sphere leadership. Robnett (l996)
provides evidence that, "The activities of African-American women in the
civil rights movement provided the bridges necessary to cross boundaries
between the personal lives of potential constituents and adherents and the
political life of civil rights movement organizations" (1664). Thus,
ironically, gender as a "construct of exclusion...helped to develop a
strong grassroots tier of leadership…women who served as "bridge leaders"
who were central to the "development of identity, collective
consciousness, and solidarity within the civil rights movement" (Robnett
l996, 1667). Although bridge leaders were not exclusively women, this
"intermediate layer" of leadership was the only one available to
women at that time (Robnett l996). Mrs. Amey, now seventy years old, has been a
key activist and a centerperson in nearly all of the Wentworth Gardens
organizing efforts discussed earlier since the mid-l950s. A woman resident's
description of Mrs. Hallie Amey provides some insight into the importance of
her leadership role:
She's [Mrs. Amey's] the type of person
who can bring a lot of good ideas to the community....And she's always there to
help. And she's always here; she's always doing things. And she's always
pulling you, she's pushing you, and she's calling you, "We've got to do
this!" She makes sure you don't forget what you have to do. Early in the
morning she's on the phone, "Mrs. Harris, what time you coming out?'' That
was to say, "you gonna do it without me having to ask, or you giving me an
excuse (Stall, interview, 1991)?
The Organizing Process
Finally, these two models adopt organizing processes that reflect the
influence of, and their conceptualization of, the public-private split. The
Alinsky model emphasizes farge formal public organizations to manage large
visible public events. The women-centered model emphasizes the development of
informal small groups that take on less visible issues, in the private sphere,
in less visible ways.
Within the Alinsky model the organizing process centers on identifying
and confronting public issues to be addressed in the public sphere. Door
knocking is the initial strategy for identifying issues. Those issues then
become the means of recruitment to the organizing effort. The organization
bills itself as the best, if not only, means of resolving those issues. The
"mass meeting" is the means for framing issues and celebrating gains.
Important to the process of building up to the mass meeting are cumulative
victories--beginning with an easily winnable issue, and using the energy
generated by that win to build to bigger and bigger issues. The public
activities of the mass march, the public rally, the explicit confrontation, the
celebrated win, are all part of building a strong organization that can
publicly represent the community's interests. The annual public convention is
the culmination of the Alinsky organizing process. The first annual convention
of the East Toledo Community Organization in 1979 was preceded by flyers
emphasizing the neglect of the east side of Toledo by city government, broken
promises from officials, the victories of initial organizing, and the unity
developing in the community. ETCO mailed packets across East Toledo that produced
500 registrants for the meeting. At the meeting itself the 500-1000 people
gathered passed 13 resolutions covering dangerous rail crossings, park
maintenance, utility complaints, service shortages, truck traffic, and many
other issues (Stoecker, 1995).
In the Alinsky model, the organizer isn't there just to win a few
issues, but to build an enduring organization that can continue to claim power
and resources for the community--to represent the community in a public sphere
pluralist polity. The organizer shouldn't start from scratch but from the
community's pre-existing organizational base of churches, service
organizations, clubs, etc. In many cases, the community organizations created
also spawn community-based services such as credit unions, daycare, etc. This
is not a process to be taken lightly or with few resources. Alinsky often
insisted that, before he would work with a community, they had to raise
$150,000 to cover three years of expenses (Lancourt 1979). When Ed Chambers
took over the Industrial Areas Foundation from Alinsky, he required $160,000
just to cover startup costs for a serious organizing project (Industrial Areas
Foundation 1978). For Alinsky, the organization itself was part of the tactical
repertoire of community organizing. Dave Beckwith, an Alinsky-style organizer
with the Center for Community Change, also argues for the centrality of the
organization.
If an organization doesn't grow, it
will die...People naturally fade in and out of involvement as their own life's
rhythms dictate--people move, kids take on baseball for the spring, they get
involved with Lamaze classes, whatever. If there are not new people coming in,
the shrinkage can be fatal. New issues and continuous outreach are the only
protection against this natural process. (Beckwith n.d., 13)
The presence, and partial restriction, of women in the private sphere
leads the women-centered organizing model to emphasize a very different
organizing process formed around creating an ideal private-sphere-like setting
rather than a large public sphere organization. The process begins by creating
a safe and nurturing space where women can identify and discuss issues
effecting the private sphere (Gutierrez, l990). This model uses the small group
to establish trust, and build "informality, respect, [and] tolerance of
spontaneity" (Hamilton l991, 44). The civil rights organizer, Ella Baker,
was dubious about the long-term value of mass meetings, lobbying and
demonstrations. Instead, she advocated organizing people in small groups so
that they could understand their potential power and how best to use it, which
had a powerful influence on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
(Britton l968; Payne l989).7 Small groups create an atmosphere that
affirms each participant's contribution, provides the time for individuals to
share, and makes it possible for participants to listen carefully to each other
(Stall, 1993). Gutierrez and Lewis (l992 126) affirm that, "The small
group provides the ideal environment for exploring the social and political
aspects of `personal' problems and for developing strategies for work toward
social change". Moreover, smaller group settings create and sustain the
relationship building and sense of significance and solidarity so integral to
community.8 Women in Organizing (WIO), a 1990s urban-based project,
organized twelve low income, African-American teenage mothers to gain
self-sufficiency and political empowerment. One of the organizing staff
described the effort of this "Young Moms Program":
Our work is about connecting women with
each other, about transforming their experience in terms of working with mixed
groups of people of different races, about building the confidence of
individual women and building the strengths of groups....All of our work is
really about leadership development of women, of learning more of how
consciousness develops, of how we can collectively change the world.
While WIO did help these women to organize an advocacy meeting with
public officials, the meeting was preceded by nearly five months of training
sessions that addressed less traditional issues such as personal growth and
advocacy in the family, as well as more traditional organizing issues (Stall,
1993).
Because there is less focus on immediate public sphere action in the
women-centered model, a continuing organization is not as central in initial
organizing. In place of the focus on organization building are "modest
struggles" ----"small, fragmented, and sometimes contradictory
efforts by people to change their lives" (Krauss l983, 54). These
short-lived collective actions (e.g., planting a community garden, opening a
daycare, organizing a public meeting) are often begun by loosely organized
groups. The organizing efforts of the African-American women in South Central
Los Angeles, described earlier, functioned for a year and a half without any
formal leadership structure. Their model depended on a rotating chair, stymying
the media's hunger for a "spokesperson" (Hamilton, l991, p. 44; see
also Ferguson, l984). If empowerment is "a process aimed at consolidating,
maintaining, or changing the nature and distribution of power in a particular
cultural context" (Bookman and Morgen l988, 4), modest struggles are a
significant factor in this process. Engagement in modest resistance allows
women to immediately alter their community and gain a sense of control over
their lives. Attention to these struggles is necessary in order to understand
the more elusive process of resistance that takes place beneath the surface and
outside of what have conventionally been defined as community organizing,
social protest, or social movements (Feldman and Stall, 1994). Women can
achieve significant change in their neighborhoods by building on the domestic
sphere and its organization, rather than separating it from their public
activities (Clark l994).. Research on New York City co-op apartment tenants in
the 1980s, found that the tenant leaders were almost always women, the majority
were African-American and were long-time residents of their building and their
community (Leavitt and Saegert l990; Clark l994). These women
organizers/leaders applied skills they had learned and used to sustain their
own families to the larger sphere of the building. They often met around
kitchen tables and they made building-wide decisions with the same ethic of
personal care that they applied to friends and family. Many of the tenant
meetings included food made by different women residents who equated sharing
their dish with the recognition of their role. The style and success of
organizing was rooted in aspects of the social life within buildings and on a
gender-based response to home and community. They discusses rent payment and
eviction issues in terms of the situations of each tenant involved, and
searched for alternatives that supported residents' overall lives as well as
ensured that good decisions were made for the building as a whole (Clark
l994:943).
CONCLUSION: SEPARATE MODELS, LINKED ISSUES
We see the differences in these two models as at least partly the result
of the historical split of family and community life into public and private
spheres as U.S. industrial capitalism destroyed Colonial-era community-based
enterprise and forced men to work outside of the home and away from the
community (Tilly and Scott 1978). The competitive, aggressive, distrustful,
confrontational culture of the public sphere contrasts starkly with the
nurturant, connected, relationship-building and care-taking ideal of the
private sphere. Clearly the emphasis on conflict, opposition, separation, and
winning in the Alinsky model reflects public sphere culture. And just as
clearly the emphasis on nurturance, connectedness, and relationship-building in
the women-centered model reflects private sphere culture (Cott l977). The fact
that for nearly four decades the Alinsky model was the preserve of male
organizers, and training in the Alinsky model was controlled by men for even
longer, while the women-centered model developed in settings closer to the
domestic sphere often among groups of women, reflects and has influenced the
development of these differences (Stall, 1991; ECCO 1989).
In the disinvestment and deindustrialization that has come with global
capitalism, each model is as weak by itself as a nuclear family with a
full-time male breadwinner and a full-time female homemaker. As corporations
either disinvested wholesale from their host communities or downsized their
local workforce, they forced women into wage-earning positions to make up for
male wage losses, leading to pressures on men to take on more private sphere
tasks. In poor communities that disinvestment left devastation--neighborhoods
without businesses, services, or safety. Indeed, many urban neighborhoods of
the 1980s and 1990s were no longer communities at all, but only collections of
medium and high density housing with few sustainable social relationships. In
this kind of a setting, gender-segregated organizing models can work no better
than gender-segregated family members. Imagine trying to employ the Alinsky
model organizing young moms who are socially isolated and exhausted from the
daily grind of trying to make ends meet. The masculine confrontational style of
the Alinsky model, that must assume prior community bonds so it can move
immediately into public sphere action, may be disabling for certain grass-roots
organizing efforts, "particularly in domains where women are a necessary
constituency" (Lawson and Barton l990, 49). The de-emphasis on
relationship building in the Alinsky model will mean that, where neighborhoods
are less and less communities, and the people in them are less and less
empowered, the community can engage the battle but not sustain it. Large
organizations may in fact inhibit empowerment because they are not "likely
to offer the kind of nurturing of individual growth that smaller ones can
provide, and may be especially off-putting to members of low-income
communities, where the predominant style of relating to individuals is still
prebureaucratic" (Payne 1989, 894). Consequently, internal power struggles
will threaten many Alinsky-style organizations in these settings.
At the same time, the problems that poor communities face today cannot
be solved at the private sphere or local levels. The women-centered model,
consequently, is also weak by itself. First is the risk that postponing public
sphere confrontation with a white patriarchal capitalist elite will maintain
the vulnerability of at-risk communities, because white patriarchal capitalists
don't play fair. While women-centered organizers are concentrating on personal
empowerment--a process which cannot be rushed--the bulldozers could be coming.
One criticism of consciousness-raising in the women's movement is that it
doesn't translate into action very effectively (Cassell l989, 55; Ferree and
Hess 1985, 64-67; Freeman, 1975). Indeed, those risks appeared very pronounced
in the Young Moms program described above. When the program was threatened with
a staff lay-off, organized resistance was difficult to mobilize. But they also
appeared in the Wentworth Gardens case where the maintaining a community-run
on-site grocery store became difficult as warehouses refused to deliver to what
they saw as a `dangerous' neighborhood. And they appeared in Cedar-Riverside as
a community clinic saw its funding cut and had to reduce services. Both
communities had shifted away from confrontational, Alinsky-style tactics to
meet these issues and were consequently unable to establish effective campaigns
against these threats. The creation, nurturance, and maintenance of community in
the face of forces which threaten to destroy it--through neglect,
disinvestment, or disdain--is an act of resistance. It is a blow against the
power structure just to survive (Hill Collins l991; hooks l990). But the
women-centered model may not work when outside forces consciously attempt to
destroy the community through any means available. There is also a danger that
this model may degenerate into a social service program, reducing participants
to clients. This tendency is what the settlement house movement, and the
subsequent "social work" version of community organizing, has been
criticized for.9
Today, global capitalism also creates a new set of challenges for
community organizing that requires drawing on both models. With footloose
capital that can make broad-reaching decisions, and can hop around at the
slightest sign of resistance from a local community, community organizing must
build even stronger relationships and interpersonal ties at the local level,
and mobilize those communities for even more forceful public sphere actions.
You can't do an action at your local bank, because your local bank is owned by
a corporation hundreds of miles or more away. Organizing to counteract and
control global corporations requires at least national and probably international
coalitions. At the same time, you must organize locally or there will not be a
strong enough base on which to build anything larger. Building relationships
that are rooted in strong local bases, that can then be linked together,
requires both models. Julian Rappaport (1981) describes the "paradox of
empowerment" as the need to organize simultaneously at the personal and
structural levels. True communities (with strong networks, culture, mutual
support systems, etc.) under siege from identifiable sources need to engage in
confrontational campaigns to defend themselves, and will probably benefit most
from emphasizing the Alinsky model. Communities that really are not
communities--that lack the networks, culture, support systems and other qualities--require
first the foundation that the women-centered model can provide to prevent
self-destructive oligarchies. But in both cases the other model cannot be
neglected. The tension created by the Alinsky model challenges the strongest
community bonds and requires compensating strategies of relationship building
and personal empowerment. And as much as a strong community provides the
foundation for a strong defense, when a threat presents itself, the community
has to be able to respond effectively. This integration of the two models also
must be done very carefully. You can't just add together an Alinsky organizing
process with a women-centered leadership model, for example. Rather,
integration needs to occur across each principle so that the models are combined.
Ella Baker's comments that "real organizing" is working in small
groups with people so that they can discover their competencies, and then
"parlaying those into larger groups" (Britton l968, 67) is an example
of bringing together the organizing process components of the Alinsky and
women-centered models.
Careful attention to history also shows there are times when one model
will be more viable than the other. Robert Fisher (1984) showed a see-sawing
between more militant and more community-building periods of community
organizing which seem to correspond to progressive and reactionary periods in
history. The transformation of Alinsky-style community organizing efforts in
the Reagan 1980s into community development efforts, and the "discovery"
of women-centered organizing during that same period, may also support the
contention that the two types of organizing may be more effective under
different conditions. Reactionary periods such as the 1980s force social
movements into "abeyance" (Taylor 1989) where the maintenance of
community bonds and the provision of emotional support become paramount, since
public sphere action seems ineffectual. In these periods, the women-centered
model sustains the possibility for future public sphere action. Certainly, in the
wake of the deindustrialization and devastation of inner city communities there
is a tremendous need to rebuild communities of place. Mary Pardo (1990, 6)
notes that "The issues traditionally addressed by women--health, housing,
sanitation, and the urban environment--have moved to center stage as capitalist
urbanization progresses." Community organizing today faces special
challenges, as the targets are no longer visible and local. As we move into the
next century, if women-centered organizing succeeds in rebuilding community
bonds, aspects of the Alinsky model may again become applicable. Some social
workers are trying to resurrect the profession’s community organizing roots
(Specht and Courtney, 1994) and are calling for a return to the empowerment model
ala Piven and Cloward (1979). And the realization that global economic
processes continually threaten local communities may provide for a new round of
social movement activity.
NOTES
1Alinsky, along with Fred Ross, were instrumental in organizing
"educationals" in California that used a popular education process to
support the organizing process. These educationals produced the first woman
organizer hired by Alinsky, and the first organizing effort targeting women
specifically (Finks, 1984:68-71).
2This is not to say that Alinsky avoided a focus on private sphere
issues. His first successful organizing attempt, in Back of the Yards, produced
a well-baby clinic, a credit union, and a hot lunch program (Finks 1984, 21).
But these programs were accomplished through public sphere strategizing, not
private relationships. In establishing and maintaining the hot lunch program,
Alinsky pushed the organization to understand its relationship to the national
hot lunch program and "In order to fight for their own Hot Lunch project
they would have to fight for every Hot Lunch project in every part of the
United States" (Alinsky 1969, 168).
3In Bullard's (1993) study of nine cases of grassroots community groups
fighting proposed toxic industrial sites, incinerators, or hazardous waste
landfills, seven of these communities were organized by women. These women
improved "the environments of day to day life" by utilizing family,
ethnic, and community networks, creating a sense of community commitment and
connection (Wekerle l996, 141).
4Sometimes, indigenous organizers did develop. Fred Ross's work in the
Southwest, for example, produced an indigenous organizer by the name of Cesar
Chavez (Reitzes and Reitzes 1987a).
5Fish (l986) distinguishes the Hull House mentoring model from the
traditional mentor model based on an unequal distribution of power between an
older gatekeeper or instructor and an apprentice. The mentor model at Hull
House, rather than a dyad, included a larger support system characterized by a
network of egalitarian relationships and shared visibility that provided both
public and private supports for the women involved.
6The Civil Rights leader, Ella Jo Baker, throughout her life modeled
group-centered leadership, stating that, "Strong people don't need strong leaders,"
(Cantarow and O'Malley l980, 53). At one point Ms. Baker shared, "I have
always thought what is needed is the development of people who are interested
not in being leaders as much as in developing leadership among other people
(Baker l973, 352).
7A quote from Payne (l989, 892-893) about Ella Baker's views shows the
distinct position of the women-centered model on how the organizing is done,
versus the immediate, visible outcome.
How many people show up for a rally may matter less
than how much the people who organize the rally learn from doing so. If the
attempt to organize the rally taught them anything about the mechanics of
organizing, if the mere act of trying caused them to grow in self-confidence,
if the organizers developed stronger bonds among themselves from striving
together, then the rally may have been a success even if no one showed up for
it. As she said, "You're organizing people to be self-sufficient rather
than to be dependent upon the charismatic leader.
8Tom Gaudette, in rebuilding the Alinsky-style Organization for a Better
Austin, started by creating small groups, but for the purpose of targeting
issues and building a larger organization (Bailey l972:66), rather than to
empower individuals as the women-centered model does.
9To the extent that service provision can be organized
through indigenous leaders, or "centerwomen", and the goal of
empowerment sustained, this tendency can be countered. The Young Moms organizer
explains, "I think social service programs for the African American
community are really extended families that you are now getting paid to be
[part of]. So if you look at it like that, it's really not about the
numbers....It's about being there when the people need you." Gilkes (l988)
discusses how women social service workers who live and work in Black
communities are fashioning new organizational structures and practices and
transforming old ones--rebeling against the traditional human service practices
(e.g. impersonal, instrumental, bureaucratic) and restructuring their
organizational settings to make them "Black-oriented" (56).
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Copyright (c) 1995 by Robert Fisher, all rights reserved. This work may
be copied in whole or in part, with proper attribution, as long as the copying
is not-for-profit "fair use" for research, commentary, study, or
teaching. For other permission, please contact the author.
A revised version of this essay will appear in Dennis Keating, Norman
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Press of Kansas, forthcoming).
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NEIGHBORHOOD ORGANIZING: THE IMPORTANCE OF HISTORICAL CONTEXT
Robert Fisher
INTRODUCTION
Neighborhood organizing has a history as old as the neighborhood concept
itself. It is certainly not simply a product of sixties dissent. New Social
Movement theory argues that community-based resistances -- around geographic
communities such as a neighborhood or communities of cultural identity such as
the black or women's community -- have become the dominant form of social
action since the 1960s, replacing more class and labor based organizing.(1)
Unlike other commentators who propose that neighborhood organizing is
disappearing, little more than a vestige of earlier urban spatial relations in
an industrial society, new social movement theorists argue that community-based
resistances, such as neighborhood organizing, become in a post-industrial order
the primary means of social change. While this theory has much to contribute to
our understanding of the contemporary salience of community-based organizing
and the importance of this collection of essays, it tends to overlook the rich
and significant history prior to the 1960s that undergirds current efforts.
To illustrate the point, this essay begins with a discussion of the
varied types of neighborhood organizing that have persisted since the late
nineteenth century and the lessons to be learned from them. It follows with a
discussion of neighborhood organizing in the 1980s, arguing that the political
economy of the larger historical context is fundamental to understanding the
nature and potential of neighborhood organizing in any historical period.
TYPES OF NEIGHBORHOOD ORGANIZING
Since the 1880s, there have been three main types of neighborhood
organizing (See Table 1). The social work approach is best characterized by the
social settlement movement, which began in the United States in 1886, and by
contemporary social service delivery at the neighborhood level, such as
neighborhood centers or health clinics. The political activist approach is best
reflected in the work of oppositional efforts which see power as the
fundamental issue. These date back to the ward-based political machines of the
nineteenth century, but as social efforts are best reflected in the efforts of
the Communist Party in the 1930s, the efforts of Saul Alinsky and followers
since the late 1930s, New Left neighborhood organizing in the 1960s, and a host
of current neighborhood based grouping since then, perhaps most notably in
African-American and gay male communities. The neighborhood maintenance
approach also originated in the late 19th century, when more middle class
residents sought to defend their neighborhood against change and perceived
threats. The ongoing history since the 1920s of neighborhood protective
associations, whose primary concern is maintaining or improving property
values, is the classic example.(2)
TABLE 1
History of Neighborhood Organizing: Three Dominant Approaches
Social Work Political Activist Neighborhood
Maintenance
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Concept of social organism political unit neighborhood
Community power base residence
Problem social powerlessness threats to
condition disorganization exploitation property values
social conflict neighborhood or neighborhood
destruction homogeneity
insufficient
services
Organized working & lower working & lower upper &
group class class middle class
Role of professional political activist elected
organizer social worker mobilizer spokesperson
enabler & advocate educator civic leader
coordinator & interest-group
planner broker
Role of partners with fellow activists dues-paying
neighborhood professional indigenous members
residents recipients of leaders
benefits mass support
Strategy seek consensus engage in conflict seek
pursue gradualist mediate consensus
tactics challenge power apply peer
work with power structure pressure
structure do political
promote social reform lobbying
engage in
legal action
Goals form groups obtain, maintain, improve property
achieve social or restructure value
integration power maintain
deliver services develop alternative neighborhood
bring about social institutions deliver services
justice
Examples social settlements Unemployed Councils neighborhood
community centers tenant organizations preservation
Cincinnati Social Alinsky programs associations
Unit Plan Student Nonviolent neighborhood
community chests Coordinating civic clubs
United Community Committee (SNCC) property
Defense Services Students for a owners'
Community Action Democratic Society associations
Program (SDS)
United Way Association of
Community
Organizations
for Reform Now
(ACORN)
LESSONS FROM THE PAST
Simply stated, there have been a number of key lessons from the past of
neighborhood organizing that should inform the study of contemporary efforts.
1) Neighborhood organizing has a long and important history. As the
Table and examples above illustrate, neighborhood organizing is not simply a
product of the past generation, not a transitory phenomenon. It is a means of
democratic participation, a means of extra-political activity, a way to build
community, obtain resources, and achieve collective goals. Neighborhood
organization has been an integral, on-going, and significant basis of civil
life in the United States for more than a century. Whereas people continually
choose in astounding numbers not to participate in the electoral process,
underscoring both the inability of politicians to galvanize the electorate and
the alienation of citizens from the political process, this is not true for
participation in neighborhood organizations. Americans have always turned most
easily to organizations at the grassroots level to build community, meet
individual and collective needs, and participate in public life. This is as
true today as it was one hundred years ago.
2) Neighborhood organizing cuts across the political spectrum. While all
neighborhood organizing is a public activity, bringing people together to
discuss and determine their collective welfare, it is not inherently
reactionary, conservative, liberal, or radical. Nor is it inherently inclusive
and democratic, or parochial and authoritarian. It is above all a political
method, an approach used by varied segments of the population to achieve
specific goals, serve certain interests, and advance clear or ill- defined
political perspectives. Organizations can be creative efforts open to innovation
and supportive of progressive struggles as well as defensive responses to
external pressures. The form an organization takes depends on a number of
factors, especially the ideology and goals of its leadership, constituency
organized, and local context.
3) Neighborhood organizing efforts develop in a larger context that
transcends local borders and determines the dominant form of neighborhood
organizing in any era. Conditions at the local level directly spawn and nurture
neighborhood organizing projects. The organizers, residents, local conditions,
and many other factors at the grassroots level combine to forge consistently
unique neighborhood organizing experiences. But while neighborhood organizing
projects do have a significant origin, nature, and existence of their own at
the local level, they are also the products of national and even international
political and economic developments. To no small degree, the larger
political-economic context determines the general tenor, goals and strategies,
even the likelihood of success, of local efforts.
Examples abound. It was the liberal reform political economy of the
Progressive Era, the period from approximately 1900 through 1917, that
responded positively to the social settlement idea and that legitimated the
first era of neighborhood organizing. While other types of neighborhood
organizing existed in this period, it was the social work approach, best
exemplified in the social settlements and the Cincinnati Social Unit Plan,
which dominated the era.
In the depression era of the 1930s the social work approach had much
less salience and support. As capitalism collapsed, as one reform solution
after another failed to halt the economic depression, the political activist
type of neighborhood organizing, most notably the radical efforts of the
Communist Party in many cities and the urban populist work of Saul Alinsky in
the Back of the Yards neighborhood in Chicago, personified grassroots activity.
The hotly debated and precarious political economy of the era legitimated
citizen action and political ferment at the grassroots level.
In the post World War II era the conservative cold war economy stifled
the political activist approach of the depression era and nurtured the
neighborhood maintenance type of neighborhood organizing. Of course,
homeowners' and property associations had been strong in the United States
since the 1920s. The business of protecting property values was important
especially in the United States, where homes were economic investments and where
the lack of government protection and support for maintaining communities put
the onus of neighborhood maintenance and development on property owners. The
conservative eras of the 1920s and 1950s, however, tied this necessity for
neighborhood associations to a reactionary politics. Segregationist goals
became quite typical of neighborhood associations, interconnecting the
protection of property values with a politics of neighborhood exclusion.
Of course the relationship between the national political economy and
neighborhood organizing is not a one way street where the dominant form of
neighborhood organizing is determined by the national political economy of an
era. (3) The historical process is much more complex, more of a dialectical
interaction between the national political economy and grassroots resistances
and initiatives. In the 1960s and the first part of the 1970s, when the
political activist type of neighborhood organizing came to dominate again, the
national political economy both produced the change and was the product of it.
It was the grassroots resistance of the southern civil rights movement, the
student New Left, and the rebellion in black urban slums that pushed the
national political economy left, that expanded the political discourse to legitimate
grassroots resistance, that demanded the passage of social policy to address
the needs of the poor and people of color. The shift in political economy at
the national level, expanded with LBJ's Great Society and War on Poverty
programs, developed in response to these challenges. These legitimated further
the political activist approach, so much so that a heyday of political activist
neighborhood organizing continued well into and through the 1970s, causing some
commentators to herald a "backyard revolution" in the making. It is
this interpenetration between the national political economy and community
organizing that comes across so vividly in the history of neighborhood efforts.
(4)
NEIGHBORHOOD ORGANIZING IN THE 1980S: CONTEXTUALIZING PRACTICE
The importance of the national, even global, political economy in
shaping the nature of neighborhood organizing is especially evident in the
1980s, in the increasing importance of CDCs and the widespread adoption by most
neighborhood organizations of more moderate strategies.
In the 1980s, as we know all too well, the United States made a clear
turn to rightwing politics at the national level. The twelve years of
Reagan/Bush policy from 1981-1993 promoted a neoconservative agenda grounded in
rightwing programs, policies, and political discourse. Responding to the
heightened demands of an emerging global economy and the challenged status of
U.S. corporations in it, neoconservatives sought to cut social costs. They went
after labor unions, government programs, and claimant movements; they shifted
even the limited political dialog about human needs completely to corporate
needs; they delegitimized the public sector and public life and pushed people
into increasingly private spheres and private conceptions of the good life.
In the neoconservative 1980s, the impact of national context on local
organizing was enormous. While a wide variety of efforts continued, promoting
democratic resistance and left insurgency, it was the neoconservative political
economy that largely determined the direction of most community organizing
during the decade, pushing them into community economic development and
moderate strategies.
Community Economic Development
In general during the 1980s concern with broader social issues and social
action receded. In the economic crisis of the past few decades, economic
survival became the paramount issue for most individuals, organizations,
businesses, and cities. As economic support for social services and solving
social problems declined due to opposition at the federal level and shrinking
tax bases at the local, and as political discourse in the nation revolved
around free market solutions to all problems, neighborhood organizing efforts
moved into the business of economic development.(5)
This trend is nowhere more evident than in the rapid growth and spread
of community development corporations (CDCs) in the 1980s. CDCs first sprang up
in the 1960s, when they were tied to the civil rights and anti-poverty
movements of the period, and were funded by a few foundations and Great Society
programs. In this first wave were only about a 100 organizations, but among
them were such well-funded, significant efforts such as The Woodlawn
Organization and the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation. For its
multitude of important projects the Bed-Stuy CDC received about $4 million in
federal support annually.
The second wave of community development organizations came in the
1970s, when the number of development projects increased tenfold. These were smaller
efforts that began in opposition to urban renewal, redlining, factory closings,
or the lack of tenant rights. For those involved in community economic
development, most funds came from foundations, primarily The Ford Foundation,
and federal sources, such as the Community Services Administration and the
Office of Neighborhood Development. The idea of community economic development
caught on in the Carter Administration, and by the late 1970s, CDCs, with all
their virtues and drawbacks, were central components of the limited but
significant, federally- assisted neighborhood development movement.
Beginning around 1980, however, CDCs found government support
drastically cut. The new, third wave of CDCs that developed in the
privatization campaigns of the Reagan years were forced into becoming much more
businesslike than their predecessors. They had to exhibit "business talent
and development skills once thought to be the exclusive province of the
for-profit sector," as one report put it. (6)
The Community Services Administration and the Office of Neighborhood
Development were dismantled. Other sources of federal funds were dramatically
cut back. The bottom line for CDCs, as with seeming everything else in the
decade, was economic success. The primary goal, as Benjamin Marquez argues in
an astute analysis of CDCs role, was to "correct the market's failure to
provide jobs and services to the community." Added to this, for the CDCs
in minority neighborhoods, was to help build a non-white middle class by developing
highly specific and measurable development projects in which neighborhood
people could work for their own economic betterment. (7) The new CDCs became
less like community organization and more like small businesses and investment
projects, evaluated on their economic success. Most avoided political
controversy, were dominated by professionals with a technical orientation, had
narrow memberships bases, and rejected social action activity.
While market demands forced most CDCs to become so oriented to economic
success that they were not able to sustain their work for community
empowerment, they did not always give up on these goals by choice. They were
forced into it. The absence of public support, newly rigid interpretations of
IRS restrictions on political activity of nonprofit groups, the necessity of
seeking funds from and joining in partnerships with private sector leaders, and
the orientation of the CDC approach to economic investment and development
decisions, all pushed CDCs away from politics and an analysis of power.
"This lack of fiscal and political support," Marquez concludes,
"has forced CDCs to accommodate themselves to rather than redirect the
course of the free market."
Economic development has become a central issue for progressive organizing
efforts that formerly spurned or discounted the strategy. Many older, prominent
community organizing efforts now do community economic development, from ACORN
to NPA (National People's Action) and IAF (Industrial Areas Foundation). To
their credit, these political activist projects see community economic
development as part of a much larger program of community work that also
includes organizing, empowerment, advocacy, and social action. Still, community
economic development has become virtually synonymous with neighborhood
organizing, as if organizing and empowerment were rooted in economic
development issues, as if neighborhood struggles were always the same as
community economic development, as if working in partnership with local banks
and putting in "sweat equity" were the answers to urban poverty and
housing shortages.
It has not quite worked out that way. "If the primary success story
of the last 25 years has been the development of a legitimate, skilled
nonprofit development sector with the proven capacity to create and preserve
housing, jobs and businesses," Bill Traynor of the Community Training and
Assistance Center in Boston sums up the problem, "the major failure has
been the proliferation and dominance of a narrowly focused -- technical --
production related model of community development which is estranged from
strong neighborhood control or direction and which does not impact the range of
issues which affect poor neighborhoods." (8)
Moderate Strategies
Most activists promoting community economic development would probably
defend their consensual approach as appropriate for the Reagan-Bush years. To
have a chance at community development, efforts must be in tune with capitalist
economic development and have a working relationship with the powers that be in
the public and private sector. Given the shift in the national political
economy, organizers think they must now be more community economic development
minded.
Neo-Alinsky organizer Shel Trapp sees a natural progression in his work.
First, organizations defend the neighborhood; then they take an
"offensive" stance. "That's when you start to link development
with organizing," he argues. (9) Robert Rivera, an IAF organizer, puts it
similarly: "There are two types of organizing. One that is for, the other
is against. Now you have to be for something. It's a different style of
organizing." (10)
But at play in the 1980s was more than a "life cycle" of
organizing. Community economic development and building community partnerships
with local economic and political elites became the dominant form of
neighborhood organizing because of the demands and constraints of organizing in
a neoconservative political economy. Organizers were willing to rewrite history
(good organizing has always been for things) in an effort to distance
themselves from the radicalism of the past, maintain current support, and
legitimate their efforts in a context hostile to social action.
The changes that took place in community development corporations are
emblematic of the way organizing responded to the conservative context of the
'80s, but moderate strategies during that period were by no means limited to
CDCs. Most neopopulist, political activist neighborhood organizing efforts
during the 1980s and early 1990s adopted more moderate strategies, and a more
moderated version of oppositional politics. Battle lines shifted. "To a
surprising extent, claim M. W. Newman and Lillian Williams in a recent Chicago
Sun Times article, "the grass roots no longer 'fight the power.' They
fight for a share of the power. Sometimes they win a sizable share....
[Sometimes they] team up with the established elite that they once derided and
that once spurned them." (11) Even National People's Action (NPA),
criticized by some organizers as too confrontational, opposed being "out
in the streets making symbolic statements, when you can be in the boardroom
negotiating specific agreements that win for neighborhoods." (12)
Consider the evolution of the Industrial Areas Foundation, the direct
descendant of Alinsky organizing, over the past decade. IAF currently has 28
organizing projects in New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Tennessee, Arizona,
California, and Texas, but it is in Texas, where the IAF network includes 10
organizing efforts, that it is the strongest. Throughout the state, in San
Antonio, Houston, El Paso, Austin, Fort Worth, and in the Rio Grande Valley,
IAF organizers and active members struggle for utility reform, improved public
education, government accountability, healthcare for the indigent, and basic
public services, including water and sewers for the "colonias". Most
visibly they organize "get out the vote" efforts to promote bond
packages to help IAF neighborhoods, hold "accountability sessions" to
keep politicians publicly in line with IAF objectives, encourage voter
registration, and work to improve schools by halting the drop out rate,
stopping drug use and violence, and getting parents more involved. More
quietly, in the day in and day out practice of community organizing they serve
as "schools of public life," empowering neighborhood residents by
giving them "an opportunity to do something about things that [they] have
been frustrated all their lives." (13)
IAF organizations do all this remarkably well, as many commentators have
noted. Peter Applebome in the New York Times proposed that the IAF Network is
"in ways large and small ... changing politics in Texas." And Mary
Beth Rogers, ex-Chief of Staff to Texas Governor Ann Richards, concludes in her
study of Texas IAF that these "are virtually the only organizations in
America that are enticing working poor people to participate in politics."
(14)
While still following much of the Alinsky style of organizing, in the
1980s IAF made some significant changes in their organizing method to meet the
needs of new constituents and adapt to the demands of a new conservative
context. The major change in IAF organizing is a shift from a radical politics
to a strategy of moderation. Where CDCs look for consensus, IAF groups focus on
the importance of "standing for the whole."
Of course, many in power still see IAF as a radical protest group, and
even during Alinsky's lifetime some IAF projects, such as The Woodlawn
Organization, shifted from "conflict to coexistence." In the 1980s,
however, this developed into an organizing credo. Now, IAF seeks to organize
"community sustainers" and "core moderates," especially
women in mainline religious congregations and civic organizations. They want
the civic volunteers who already work tirelessly for the PTA or church group --
the folks, IAF says, who already protect the community and stand for the whole.
The strategy of moderation pushes IAF organizers to distance themselves
from radicals and social movements. Whereas Alinsky took pride in being a
radical, in the current IAF radicals are seen as alienated outsiders. "IAF
now almost makes a fetish of its commitment to moderates," notes organizer
trainer Mike Miller in a recent article in Christianity and Crisis. "Will
the next book be Reveille for Moderates?" (15)
Standing for the whole seeks to legitimize grassroots organizing in the
eyes of both the powerless and the powerful, both of whom IAF assumes, as do
CDC proponents, to be fundamentally moderate in outlook. It seeks to create a
working relationship between those with and without power in order to promote
the interests of its members. In the 1980s confronting government officials
became -- according to IAF -- less and less productive. Even when local
government officials were sympathetic with the issues, they felt they did not
have the resources to address them. So "standing for the whole" now
includes developing working relationships with business and government leaders
in order to further the goals of both IAF constituents and the larger
community. (16)
The strategy of moderation, the commitment to moderates, the grounding
of IAF efforts in mainstream religious institutions, and a definition of power
which emphasizes building relationships leads, however, to a politics which
limits the parameters of IAF's work, and excludes alliances with other movement
activists and organizations, as Mike Miller and others persuasively argue. It
encourages IAF to work alone with its constituency and mainstream allies, and
to avoid confronting the harsh realities of power that oppress their
constituents.
The moderate strategy, for all its short-term gains, is fraught with
traps. Most important, the emphasis on moderation and negotiation and a more
interest group style of politics changes the role of the organizer. Standing
for the whole moves IAF away from the Alinsky idea of the organizer being in
the background, working his or her way out of a job, focusing on primarily
developing community residents to lead the organization. The more IAF gets
involved in negotiating with government officials and corporate executives, the
more the organizers have come center stage to be the brokers and spokespersons
for the organization. And the more the organizer becomes the broker, the more
potential, as in all interest group organizing, to be both coopted and, worse,
ignored. Moderate strategy ultimately bargains away the tactic of radical
protest. The American Medical Association and other powerful interest groups
can afford to be moderate; poor and working people must always fight for power.
NEIGHBORHOOD ORGANIZING IN THE '90S
The responses of grassroots efforts to shifts in the national political
economy always produce strategies that both replicate and challenge existing
power relations. For all its obvious limitations, a focus on community economic
development has built a broad base of real technical expertise and created
innovative projects which in a limited way help meet the dire need for housing
and in poor neighborhoods. The politics of moderation gives up on more radical
change but it helps build the capacity for governance, gets advocates to the
bargaining table, and wins modest victories.
Given the dramatic tensions and shifts occurring worldwide, both in the
global economy and in national political struggles, we can expect in the near
future to see the political economy encourage more of the same: continued
proliferation and preference for grassroots efforts, continued focus on
community economic development as global competition remains heated and as
nation- states and corporate-elites persist in avoiding domestic social needs,
and continued diverse strategies with most funding and support going to
moderate approaches which are willing to work with business and government
leaders.
Current events will likely continue to overwhelm such neighborhood
efforts. It is much more difficult to be optimistic now about the prospects of
neighborhood organizing than it was just 15 years ago. It is no paradox
neoconservatives call for neighborhood-based solutions and "empowerment"
of citizens; they know well that these are less expensive strategies for
problems that require costly national and global solutions and neighborhood-
based initiatives. Without the existence of a social movement able to push the
national political discourse left, win funding for social programs and
redistributional policies, and struggle for state power, we can expect, at
best, incremental change from the top and important but modest victories at the
grassroots. Whatever the context ahead, neighborhood organizing, even with its
limits, will remain essential: as schools of democracy and progressive
citizenship, as seeds of larger resistance efforts, as demonstrations of the
persistence of public life in an increasingly private world, as the vehicles of
struggle in which we win victories, develop skills, forge identity, and
legitimate opposition, and as potential grassroots components of the next major
social justice movement. To play such roles, however, neighborhood organizing
must both build on and go beyond the contemporary context. It must benefit from
the new skills and strategies learned in the 1980s and challenge the
neoconservative political economy which heavily shaped organizing in the past
decade. While the history of neighborhood organizing makes clear that national
context is fundamental, it also instructs that conflict -- ideological and
direct action challenges -- is essential to push the context, policies, and
programs towards meeting basic human needs and implementing more democratic
processes.
Robert Fisher teaches social policy and community organization at the
Graduate School of Social Work, University of Houston, where he is also chair
of the program in Political Social Work. Most recently, he authored a second
edition of Let The People Decide: Neighborhood Organizing in America (Twayne,
1994).
NOTES
1. See, for starters, Barbara Epstein, `Rethinking Social Movement
Theory.' SOCIALIST REVIEW 90 (January-March, 1990), 35-66; Robert Fisher and
Joseph Kling, eds., MOBILIZING THE COMMUNITY: LOCAL POLITICS IN THE ERA OF THE
GLOBAL CITY (Sage, 1993).
2. See Robert Fisher, LET THE PEOPLE DECIDE: NEIGHBORHOOD ORGANIZING IN
AMERICA Updated Edition (Twayne, 1994) for introductory discussions of these
efforts and bibliography for further reading. Mike Davis, CITY OF QUARTZ (New
York: Vintage, 1992) offers a scathing critique of the reactionary nature of
homeowner's associations in Los Angeles.
3. There are other caveats to offer related to the typology of
neighborhood organizing and the relationship between national and neighborhood
efforts. For example, each type of neighborhood organizing is evident in all
eras. It is not as though one ends and the other begins. For the past century
there have been continuous efforts at building service delivery organization,
radical opposition, and neighborhood protection associations. It is just that
each period tends to produce a *dominant* form most appropriate to it. In
addition, there is a good deal of overlapping in the types. Political activist
organizations also deliver services. Service organizations also seek to
maintain neighborhoods. Neighborhood maintenance often entails being very
political and activist. Nevertheless, the essential points of this essay
remain: neighborhood organizing has a long history, this history reveals a
highly varied politics, and the national political economy is critical to
shaping a dominant form of neighborhood organizing in varied historical eras.
4. A debate currently rages in urban politics between political process
and structural theorists, not to mention poststructuralists. For a discussion
of the theoretical debate see John Logan and Todd Swanstrom, eds., BEYOND THE
CITY LIMITS (Temple University Press, 1990); and Robert Fisher and Joseph
Kling, eds., MOBILIZING THE COMMUNITY: LOCAL POLITICS IN THE ERA OF THE GLOBAL
CITY (Sage, 1993). I do not intend here to minimize the importance of the
organizer and local context in the organizing process; I would, however, argue
that changes in organizing strategy that seem natural and internally initiated
(decisions made by organizers and activists or influenced by local factors) are
usually products of or at least are heavily influenced by larger contextual
changes (decisions made within a limited set of externally structured choices).
5. Neal B. Peirce and Carol F. Steinbach, ENTERPRISING COMMUNITIES:
COMMUNITY BASED DEVELOPMENT IN AMERICA, 1990 (Washington, D.C.: Council for
Community-Based Development, 1990), 15-16.
6. Peirce and Steinbach, CORRECTIVE CAPITALISM, 30.
7. Benjamin Marquez, "Mexican American Community Development
Corporations and the Limits of Directed Capitalism," manuscript, 6.
Article will be published in ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT QUARTERLY 7 (no. 3),
forthcoming.
8. Bill Traynor, "Community Development and Community Organizing,"
SHELTERFORCE (March/April, 1993 #68), 4.
9. Trapp quoted in Jeffrey L. Katz, "Neighborhood Politics: A
Changing World," GOVERNING (Novvember, 1990), 49.
10. Robert Rivera, lecture at the University of Houston, April 18, 1991.
11. M. W. Newman and Lillian Williams, "People Power: Chicago's
Real Clout," in CHICAGO SUN TIMES, April 6, 1990, 12.
12. Shel Trapp, "Dynamics of Organizing," DISCLOSURE (March-
April, 1992), 2.
13. Ernesto Cortes quoted in Harry Boyte, COMMONWEALTH: A RETURN TO
CITIZEN POLITICS (New York: Free Press, 1989), 191, endnote 21.
14. Peter Applebome, "Changing Texas Politics at its Roots,"
NEW YORK TIMES May 31, 1988; Mary Beth Rogers, COLD ANGER: A STORY OF FAITH AND
POWER POLITICS (Denton: North Texas State University Press, 1990), 2.
15. Mike Miller, "Saul Alinsky and the Democratic Spirit,"
CHRISTIANITY AND CRISIS 52 (May 25, 1992) copy sent to author, no page numbers.
16. "Standing for the Whole," Industrial Areas Foundation
statement, 1990; ORGANIZING FOR TEXAS FAMILIES AND CONGREGATIONS, referenced in
Pearl Caesar, ed., "Texas IAF Network: Vision, Values, and Action,"
brochure published by Texas IAF Network, 1990), 13.
Bob Fisher Graduate School of Social Work University of Houston Houston,
Texas 77204-4492 Tel: 713 743-8112 Fax: 713 743-8149 Internet: bfisher@uh.edu
.
---------------------------
QUEENSLAND- AUSTRALIA- SURVEYS- PURPOSE AND BEST RESULTS..
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About Statistics
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Survey methods
Contents
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What is a
survey?
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When to
use a survey
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Survey
process
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Data
collection method
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Sources
of error
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Bias and
accuracy
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Engaging
consultants/contractors
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Where can
I get further assistance?
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What
is a survey?
A survey is a
method of collecting information. It may collect information about a
population’s characteristics, self-reported and observed behaviour, awareness
of programs, attitudes or opinions, and needs. Repeating surveys at regular
intervals can assist in the measurement of changes over time. Information
collected using surveys is invaluable in planning and evaluating policies and
programs.
Unlike a census,
where all members of a population are studied, sample surveys gather
information from only a portion of a population of interest. The size of the
sample depends on the purpose of the study.
In a statistically
valid survey, the sample is objectively chosen so that each member of the
population will have a known
non-zero chance of selection. Only then can the results be reliably
projected from the sample to the population. The sample should not be selected
haphazardly or only from those who volunteer to participate.
When to use a survey
When determining
the need for a survey, first check that the required information is not already
available (for example, conduct library searches, check Open Data, refer to
Queensland Government Statistician's Office (QGSO)).
The option of
collecting the required information using existing administrative records
should also be explored. Using existing data or records provides considerable
advantages in terms of cost, time, and the absence of respondent burden. The
major disadvantage is the lack of control over the data collected.
If existing data
are not available or suitable, a number of factors must then be considered when
determining which type of survey, if any, is appropriate.
Overall objectives
- What are the objectives of the project?
- Are any existing data collections, research outputs, or sources of information related to the objectives already available?
- Are any of the objectives measurable through the process of asking questions?
- Can any of the objectives be met by gathering information using a quantitative survey?
Ethical consideration
- Do you need identifying information (for example, names, addresses, telephone numbers) relating to respondents for follow-up research, or matching with other data? If so, you will need to clearly explain why you need such details, and obtain the respondents' consent.
- Will respondents be adversely affected or harmed as a direct result of participating in the survey?
- Are procedures in place for respondents to check the identity and bona fides of the researchers?
- Is the survey to be conducted on a voluntary basis? If so, respondents must not be misled to believe it is compulsory when being asked for their cooperation.
- Is it necessary to interview children under 14 years? If so, consent must first be obtained from their parent/guardian/responsible adult.
Legislative powers
- Do you have authority to collect the information through either a compulsory or voluntary survey? (See Legislative framework on this website.)
Survey design and target
population
- Are responses likely to be varied and diverse? If so, qualitative research may be required first, to inform the design of quantitative questions.
- Is the survey likely to be repeated, to measure change over time?
- Is the target population for the survey clearly identified or identifiable? What contact information is available?
- What particular respondent characteristics need to be quantified?
Data collection
- How complex and how sensitive is the topic?
- Do respondents have access to the required information?
- Will they be willing to supply the information?
- What is the most appropriate mode of delivery for survey questions (e.g. telephone, mail, web, face-to-face, observation, or a combination), with regard to data quality requirements and cost-effectiveness? Each mode of administration has strengths and weaknesses when asking about specific topics. They may be associated with very different response rates and potential for bias, so expert advice is desirable.
- How important is it to have information collected:
- by an independent source, to capture both positive and negative responses?
- securely or under legislation which protects confidentiality?
- efficiently and effectively by professional statisticians?
- by an organisation with rigorous quality assurance processes, certified to international standards?
Expected outputs
- How will the data and information derived from the survey be used?
- What level of error can be tolerated? This will depend on how you intend to use the survey results.
- Who is the target audience for the survey results?
- How might the survey results be best presented to the intended audience (e.g. commentary, tables, graphs etc.) to ensure that they’re understood?
Timing and cost
- Are the necessary financial, staff, computer, or other resources available to conduct the survey, and have the results analysed and reported?
- When is the best time to conduct the survey? (For example, need to allow for seasonality, impact of school holiday periods etc.)
- When are the outputs required? A quantitative survey takes a certain, irreducible amount of time to be developed and carried out in order to produce results which can be analysed and reported. Is enough time available to ensure that data of sufficient quality can be collected and analysed?
- Is the survey to be repeated? How often?
(Please see Pre–survey scoping considerations
(link at bottom of page) for a printable version.)
Survey process
The following is an
outline of the general process to be followed once the need for a survey has
been determined. Some steps will not be necessary in all cases, and some
processes can be carried out at the same time (for example, data collection and
preparation for data entry and processing).
A sample survey is
usually cheaper and timelier than a census, but still requires significant
resources, effort and time. The survey process is complex and the stages are
not necessarily sequential. Pilot testing of at least key elements, such as the
questionnaire and survey operations, is a strongly recommended part of the
development stage. It may be necessary to go through more than one cycle of
development, testing, evaluation and modification before a satisfactory
solution is reached.
The entire process
should be planned ahead, including all critical dates. It is always beneficial
to approach QGSO or prospective consultants as early as possible during the
planning stage.
The time required
from initial planning to the completion of a report or publication may vary
from several weeks to several months according to the size and type of survey.
Key steps in the survey process include:
Planning and designing
- Define the purpose and objectives of the survey and the required outputs. Experience has shown that well–defined output requirements at the outset minimise the risk of the survey producing invalid results.
- Design collection methodology (see below) and sample selection method.
- Develop survey procedures. Design and produce questionnaires and any other documentation (for example, instructions for interviewers and introductory letters or emails).
Testing and modifying
- Test data collection systems (for example web survey programs or programs used by interviewers).
- Pilot test all aspects of the survey if possible. As a minimum, a small-scale pre-test of questionnaires can reveal problems with question wording, layout, understanding or respondent reaction.
- Analyse test results (completed questionnaires, response rate etc.). Obtain feedback from respondents and/or interviewers.
- Modify procedures, questionnaires and documentation according to test evaluation.
- Repeat steps as required.
Pre-survey
- Finalise procedures, questionnaires and documentation.
- Select sample. There are many methods of selecting a sample, varying in complexity. Some of these are discussed further, below. For additional advice on choosing an appropriate sample, refer to QGSO.
- Train interviewers (if interviewer-based).
Conducting the survey
- Conduct the survey, including follow-up of refusals and non-contacts, supervision and checks of interviewers’ work.
Processing and analysing
- Enter (if required), check and clean data.
- Process data—calculate population estimates (if required) and confidence intervals, prepare output tables.
- Conduct data analysis and prepare report of survey results.
- Prepare technical report—evaluate and document all aspects of the survey for use when designing future surveys.
Data collection method
Commonly used
methods for collecting quantitative data include telephone and face-to-face
interviews, self-completion questionnaires (such as web-based, mail, email, or
SMS) or combinations of these.
Each has advantages
and disadvantages in terms of the cost, time, response rate and the type of
information that can be collected.
QGSO primarily uses
telephone interview (Computer
Assisted Telephone Interviewing (CATI)) and web‑based survey
methods, or a combination of these.
Telephone surveys
A survey frame or
list which contains telephone numbers is required to conduct a telephone
survey. For general population surveys, such lists are not readily available or
they have limitations that can lead to biased results.
The official
electronic White Pages list can be used to select a sample of households, but
the sample will not include households with silent numbers. In addition, it may
exclude households with recent new connections, recent changes to existing
numbers, or mobile-only households. Research conducted by the Australian Communications and Media Authority
(ACMA) shows that an increasing number of Australian households do not have a
landline telephone connected, and rely solely on a mobile phone(s).
Random digit
dialling, using landline and/or mobile numbers, may address some of the
under-coverage associated with an electronic White Pages or electoral roll
list, but it is inefficient for sampling at a low geographic level, and does
not allow for communicating (via pre-approach letter, for example) with
households prior to the commencement of telephone interviewing.
When QGSO conducts
telephone surveys that need to reflect a representative cross-section of the
Queensland public, households are randomly selected based on information from
databases kept by QGSO for official statistical purposes under the
authority of the Statistical Returns
Act 1896.
Interviewer-based
surveys, such as face-to-face or telephone surveys, can allow
more data to be gathered than self-completion surveys.
Interviewers can
reduce non-response by answering respondents’ queries or concerns. They can
often pick up and resolve respondent errors.
Face-to-face
surveys are usually more expensive than other methodologies, and poor
interviewers can introduce additional errors. Although the face-to-face
approach may be unsuitable for some sensitive topics, it may sometimes be
appropriate, with specially trained interviewers.
Telephone surveys
are generally cheaper and quicker than face-to-face surveys, and are well
suited to situations where timely results are needed. However, non-response may
be higher than for face-to-face surveys as it is harder for interviewers to
prove their identity, assure confidentiality and establish rapport.
Telephone surveys
are not suited for situations where the respondents need to refer to records
extensively. Also, the questionnaires must be simpler and shorter than for
face-to-face surveys and prompt cards cannot be used.
Computer Assisted
Telephone Interviewing (CATI) is a particular type of telephone survey technique that helps to
resolve some of the limitations of general telephone-based surveying. With
CATI, interviewers use a computer terminal. The questions appear on the
computer screen and the interviewers enter responses directly into the
computer. The interviewer’s screen is programmed to show questions in the
planned order. Interviewers cannot inadvertently omit questions or ask them out
of sequence. Online messages warn interviewers if they enter invalid values or
unusual values.
Most CATI systems
also allow many aspects of survey operations to be automated, e.g. rescheduling
of call-backs, engaged numbers and “no answers”, and allow automatic dialling
and remote supervision of interviewer/respondent interaction.
Self-completion surveys via mail, email, the internet or SMS are generally
the least expensive, particularly for a widespread sample. They allow
respondents time to consider their answers, refer to records or consult with
others (which can be helpful or unhelpful, depending on the survey’s
objectives). They also eliminate interviewer errors and reduce the incidence of
selected people (or units) being unable to be contacted.
A major
disadvantage of self-completion surveys is the potentially high non-response.
In such cases, substantial bias can result if people who do not complete the
survey have different characteristics from those who do. However, response may
be improved using techniques such as well–written introductory letters,
incentives for timely completion of questionnaires, and follow-up for those
initially not responding. Item non-response is another disadvantage of
self-completion surveys.
In self-completion
surveys, there is no opportunity to clarify answers or supplement the survey
with observational data. In mail surveys, the questionnaire usually has to be
simple and reasonably short, particularly when surveying the general community.
Internet and email-based surveys are commonly used for surveying clients or
staff within organisations. They are a cheaper option than mail or
interviewer-based surveys, and they allow more complex questionnaires to be
used than mail surveys do.
Online panel surveys are another option for data collection. However, the
panel members almost always represent a non-probability sample of the
population, and the issues associated with this are covered below, under Bias and accuracy.
Sources of error
Whether a survey is
being conducted by departmental/agency staff or by consultants, it is important
to be aware of potential sources of error, and strategies to minimise them.
Errors arising in
the collection of survey data can be divided into two types—sampling error and non‑sampling error.
Sampling error occurs when data are collected from a sample
rather than the entire population. The sampling error associated with survey
results for a particular sub-group of interest depends mainly on the number of
achieved responses for that sub-group, rather than on the percentage of units
sampled. Estimates of sampling error, such as standard errors, can be
calculated mathematically. They are affected by factors such as:
- sample size—increasing the sample size will decrease the sampling error
- population variability—a larger sampling error will be present if the items of interest vary greatly within the population
- sample design—standard errors cannot be calculated if the probability of selection is not known (for example, quota sampling (see Bias and accuracy, below)).
All other error
associated with collecting survey data is called non-sampling error, and can occur at any stage of
the survey process. Such error is not easily identified or quantified, and
therefore cannot be measured in the same way as sampling error. It is, however,
just as important. The following table lists common sources of non-sampling
error and some strategies to minimise them.
Source of error
|
Examples
|
Strategies to minimise error
|
Planning
and interpretation
|
Undefined
survey objectives; inadequate definitions of concepts, terms or populations.
|
Ensure
survey objectives are outlined, and all concepts, terms and populations are
defined precisely, through consultation between data users and survey designers.
|
Sample
selection
|
Inadequate
list from which sample is selected; biased sample selection.
|
Check
list for accuracy, duplicates and missing units; use appropriate selection
procedures (see “Bias and Accuracy” below).
|
Survey
methods
|
Inappropriate
method (e.g., mail survey for a very complicated topic).
|
Choose
an appropriate method and test thoroughly.
|
Questionnaire
|
Loaded,
misleading or ambiguous questions, poor layout or sequencing.
|
Use
plain English, clear questions and logical layout; test thoroughly.
|
Interviewers
|
Leading
respondents, making assumptions, misunderstanding or misrecording answers.
|
Provide
clear interviewer instructions and appropriate training, including exercises
and field supervision.
|
Respondents
|
Refusals,
memory problems, rounding answers, protecting personal interests or
integrity.
|
Promote
survey through public media, appropriate to the target population; ensure
confidentiality; if interviewer-based, use well-trained, impartial
interviewers and probing techniques; if mail-based, use a well-written
introductory letter.
|
Processing
|
Errors
in data cleaning.
|
Adequately
train and supervise processing staff; check a sample of each person’s work.
|
Estimation
|
Incorrect
weighting, errors in calculation of estimates.
|
Ensure
that skilled statisticians undertake estimation.
|
If a consultant
conducts the survey, you, as a client, should have input into the questionnaire
design, participate in testing, and attend interviewer training and debriefing.
Details of techniques used to minimise non-sampling error should be requested.
Bias and accuracy
Non-response occurs
in virtually all surveys through factors such as refusals, non-contact and
language difficulties.
It is of particular
importance if the characteristics of non-respondents differ from respondents.
For example, if high-income earners are more likely to refuse to participate in
an income survey, the results will obviously be biased towards lower incomes.
For this reason,
all surveys should aim for the maximum possible response rate, within cost and
time constraints, by using techniques such as call-backs to non-contacts, and
follow-up of refusals. The level of non-response should always be measured.
Bias can also arise
from inadequate sampling
frames, the lists from which respondents are selected.
Household and business mobile and landline telephone listings, and electoral
rolls, are often used as sampling frames, but they all have limitations, as
detailed earlier in Data
collection method. Once again, if people/businesses omitted from
the frame have different characteristics from those included, bias will be
introduced.
One selection
method often used by researchers is quota
sampling. Interviewers are instructed to obtain a certain
number of interviews, often with respondents in particular categories. For
example, 30 interviews with females aged 18 to 25 years, and 20 interviews with
males aged 18 to 25 years etc. Interviewers may interview anyone fitting these
criteria. Unfortunately, people who are most easily contacted or most
approachable may have different opinions or behaviour to those not interviewed,
introducing potential bias. As each person’s chance of selection is not known,
standard errors cannot, strictly speaking, be calculated. Consequently, the
accuracy of the survey results cannot be determined.
Hint
For this reason, QGSO strongly recommends that probability sampling, where each person or unit has a known non-zero chance of selection, be used in preference to quota sampling. In probability sampling, the sample is selected by objective methods and, when properly carried out, there is no risk of bias arising from subjective judgements in the selection of the sample.
For this reason, QGSO strongly recommends that probability sampling, where each person or unit has a known non-zero chance of selection, be used in preference to quota sampling. In probability sampling, the sample is selected by objective methods and, when properly carried out, there is no risk of bias arising from subjective judgements in the selection of the sample.
If constraints are
such that a probability sample is impractical, other research methods—such as
focus groups or purposive sampling—should be considered. It must be remembered,
however, that results from these procedures cannot be assumed to be
representative of a broader population.
When a probability
sample has been undertaken, standard errors should be calculated to check the
accuracy of all results, and this may be used to calculate relative standard
errors (RSEs) or confidence intervals.
Hint
QGSO recommends that estimates with an RSE (that is, the standard error divided by the estimate multiplied by 100) which exceeds 50% should not be used. Estimates with an RSE from 25% to 50% inclusive should be used with caution, as should estimates with large confidence intervals.
QGSO recommends that estimates with an RSE (that is, the standard error divided by the estimate multiplied by 100) which exceeds 50% should not be used. Estimates with an RSE from 25% to 50% inclusive should be used with caution, as should estimates with large confidence intervals.
Engaging consultants/contractors
QGSO can provide
assistance to Queensland Government agencies needing to conduct surveys. (See Surveys
on this website for details.)
The following
information on preparing briefs may be of particular assistance in the
engagement of consultants or contractors to conduct all or part of a survey. Please also refer
to the Queensland Government’s Market research services—buyers'
guide for
information on the general process and requirements for procuring external
consultants or contractors to perform survey work for Queensland Government.
To obtain the
highest quality proposals, it is important to provide contenders with the
maximum amount of relevant information. Concentrate on clearly stating aims,
objectives and requirements.
The following
(additional) information should be included in a brief for the conduct of a
survey:
Background
Give relevant
background details such as previous research and where the survey fits into the
department’s/agency’s program.
Objectives
Outline the
specific purpose and objectives of the survey.
Population
Indicate the
population and/or sub-populations of interest. For example, all Queensland
women aged 18 years or over.
The consultancy
Provide details of
the survey content and preferred method (if appropriate). Include a list of
data items and output specifications (for example, tables and analyses,
including accuracy requirements). Attach a draft questionnaire, if prepared.
Specify reporting requirements, including the calculation of standard errors or
confidence intervals, and details of response rates and techniques used to
minimise non-sampling error. Clearly indicate the parts of the project which
will be the responsibility of the consultant.
Timing
Include dates, such
as:
- receipt of proposals
- engagement of consultant
- commencement and completion of pilot testing, if known
- commencement and completion of survey, if known
- presentation of results or report.
Proposals
Indicate proposal
requirements, such as:
- details of proposed method
- full breakdown of costs (list categories of interest)
- details of interviewers, if appropriate (for example, number, location, training, experience)
- details of previous relevant work
- names and backgrounds of staff who would be responsible for the project
- details of any part of the project which would be subcontracted to another organisation
- proposed timetable.
Selection criteria
Selection criteria
should cover:
- quality, clarity and relevance of proposed survey design
- expertise in technical and operational aspects of sample surveys
- demonstrated ability in undertaking similar work.
Where can I get further assistance?
Requests for advice
or further information from Queensland Government Statistician's Office about
conducting surveys should be directed to:
Queensland
Government Statistician's Office
Queensland Treasury
PO Box 15037
Queensland Treasury
PO Box 15037
CITY EAST QLD 4002
Telephone: (07)
3035 6421
Email: govstat@treasury.qld.gov.au
----------------
----------
Don’t make this mistake.. Labour
Movement
-----------------------
-------------------
How the grassroots
works
Any political
strategy that depends on broad grassroots support for its success needs to be
based on a sound understanding of how the grassroots works.
Without such an understanding, the strategy will tend to miscalculate its
approach to handling the grassroots, resulting in failure.
The fact is, the "grassroots" is not like anything else in politics. By its very nature, it's fiercely resistant to central control — yet it can be incomparably loyal and self-sacrificing. Properly understood and respected (and hence properly utilized), it has the potential to alter an entire culture. Approached incorrectly, it will turn on those who seek to exploit it.
For these reasons, today's major political movements tend to ignore the grassroots and focus almost exclusively on the use of media to gather winning support at the polls. This works fine as long as the media are susceptible to being courted. But a cause that seriously challenges the media's inherent or conventional tendencies cannot afford to rely alone on media exposure — including paid advertising. Positive gains by unconventional movements can easily be undone by the media through its powerful domination of the public mind. Freedom-minded Americans must therefore find ways to MOBILIZE THE GRASSROOTS if they are to have any hope of making enduring improvements to American society.
Definition
By definition, the grassroots is the bottom of the political pyramid, opposite the "establishment," which controls the top. While the establishment concentrates power in relatively few people in the highest echelons of power — typically party leaders, elected officials, appointed aides or bureaucrats, and others who wield considerable authority over others (and whose business is limiting others' choices) — the grassroots includes virtually everyone else, those common people who do not necessarily hold any political office and who may even be getting their first taste of politics in a particular cause.
It is important to understand, however, that the above model is overly simplified. The grassroots and the establishment can often be the same. People can function simultaneously in either realm, and many often do. In fact, a large proportion of grassroots activists are current office holders or party leaders who are deeply engaged, alongside common citizens, in what could only be described as grassroots activism — involving them in cooperative, advisory, or leadership roles with people of the lower echelons. At the same time, many at the grassroots are inseparable in the public mind from the highest levels of political power, because of their effectiveness in influencing elected officials to change public policy.
What this means is that, ultimately, "the grassroots" is an ATTITUDE. It is an attitude of freedom, of creativity, of unrestrained political enthusiasm, of willingness to band together with ordinary citizens for a common purpose. It has nothing inherently to do with holding a position. It is what some political leaders do outside or beyond their official duties when they get involved in popular causes. It is what regular people do politically alongside others of like minds, without undue concern for conventional roles or authority.
The grassroots is the very essence of politics. It is dumping tea in a harbor, or standing up and testifying at a local city council meeting, or taking a political candidate aside after a rally and giving him or her some advice, or handing out leaflets at a mall. It is that whole realm of politics beyond official station, although many of high station moonlight as grassroots activists — some unintentionally, by their willingness to rub shoulders with the citizenry.
Grassroots behavior
People at the grassroots are anxious to do something. They are especially anxious to do something MEANINGFUL — at least to them. They are politically-minded people who — when they find a cause worthy of their time, energy, and means — are willing to let go of inhibitions, fears, and preconceptions and jump into the cause with unusual passion.
Motivated grassroots activists can be counted on to carry the burden for any particular political cause. They will make phone calls, label envelopes, knock on doors, organize their friends and relatives, e-mail everybody on their lists, march in the streets, put up yard signs, attend rallies, volunteer for leadership, write letters to editors, lobby VIP's, distribute petitions, donate money, and in countless other ways make great personal sacrifice for what they believe in.
They do these things because of their belief in the ideals that define what it means to be an American. Nearly all true grassroots activists in our nation — unlike establishment authorities who control the political process (including those in academia and the media) — are thus FUNDAMENTALLY CONSERVATIVE. They are at least believers in the sanctity of American's founding ideals and are inclined to support the causes of economic liberty, natural law, and moral responsibility. They are rock-solid, sincere Americans.
And there are literally millions who fit this description. Given the right conditions, they will perform yeoman work indispensable to the success of any major political movement.
Activating the grassroots
The real grassroots strength of America has never been fully tapped, at least not since our founding, when a large proportion of common citizens rose up and made a difference. Whatever grassroots activity we see today is restricted mainly to those individuals who are the most assertive or outspoken. Millions of others would join these visible activists — in every movement from pro-life to pro-marriage to pro-Second Amendment to pro-property rights — if they knew where to turn for adequate leadership, and if they understood how far America has steadily moved toward the brink of social and political collapse. Unfortunately, the grassroots remain largely dormant, due to the fact that even principled political leaders have never learned to fully inspire the grassroots to meaningful action or enlist their full help.
Again, it is important to stress that virtually all truly grassroots activists are sympathetic to moral conservatism. The lawless radicals we often see on the news holding America hostage are not genuine grassroots. They tend to be avant-garde elitists from academia whose main interest is dismantling America's traditions, in preparation for a world of government-dictated servility. They take their orders from above — not below. They are an extension of top-down plans for disrupting our society, not common Americans who sincerely want to preserve our nation from their position at the bottom of the political spectrum. True grassroots activism springs from ordinary citizens and tends toward principled American liberty, not dependency on increased government power.
That being the case — all those who would like to mobilize the grassroots for a particular purpose must, themselves, embody and follow ideals that are consistent with those of America's founding, or the grassroots won't rise to the occasion. This doesn't mean simply rallying citizens to the cause of preserving our nation — although that is essential. It means respecting and exemplifying the very principles that rallied our forebears: treating the grassroots as equals; respecting the grassroots' need for freedom; and recognizing that no one controls the grassroots from the top down.
Below are principles for working with the grassroots, based on the typical behavior of those who join grassroots movements. These principles cannot be divorced from any serious attempt to reclaim America through broad grassroots activism.
The fact is, the "grassroots" is not like anything else in politics. By its very nature, it's fiercely resistant to central control — yet it can be incomparably loyal and self-sacrificing. Properly understood and respected (and hence properly utilized), it has the potential to alter an entire culture. Approached incorrectly, it will turn on those who seek to exploit it.
For these reasons, today's major political movements tend to ignore the grassroots and focus almost exclusively on the use of media to gather winning support at the polls. This works fine as long as the media are susceptible to being courted. But a cause that seriously challenges the media's inherent or conventional tendencies cannot afford to rely alone on media exposure — including paid advertising. Positive gains by unconventional movements can easily be undone by the media through its powerful domination of the public mind. Freedom-minded Americans must therefore find ways to MOBILIZE THE GRASSROOTS if they are to have any hope of making enduring improvements to American society.
Definition
By definition, the grassroots is the bottom of the political pyramid, opposite the "establishment," which controls the top. While the establishment concentrates power in relatively few people in the highest echelons of power — typically party leaders, elected officials, appointed aides or bureaucrats, and others who wield considerable authority over others (and whose business is limiting others' choices) — the grassroots includes virtually everyone else, those common people who do not necessarily hold any political office and who may even be getting their first taste of politics in a particular cause.
It is important to understand, however, that the above model is overly simplified. The grassroots and the establishment can often be the same. People can function simultaneously in either realm, and many often do. In fact, a large proportion of grassroots activists are current office holders or party leaders who are deeply engaged, alongside common citizens, in what could only be described as grassroots activism — involving them in cooperative, advisory, or leadership roles with people of the lower echelons. At the same time, many at the grassroots are inseparable in the public mind from the highest levels of political power, because of their effectiveness in influencing elected officials to change public policy.
What this means is that, ultimately, "the grassroots" is an ATTITUDE. It is an attitude of freedom, of creativity, of unrestrained political enthusiasm, of willingness to band together with ordinary citizens for a common purpose. It has nothing inherently to do with holding a position. It is what some political leaders do outside or beyond their official duties when they get involved in popular causes. It is what regular people do politically alongside others of like minds, without undue concern for conventional roles or authority.
The grassroots is the very essence of politics. It is dumping tea in a harbor, or standing up and testifying at a local city council meeting, or taking a political candidate aside after a rally and giving him or her some advice, or handing out leaflets at a mall. It is that whole realm of politics beyond official station, although many of high station moonlight as grassroots activists — some unintentionally, by their willingness to rub shoulders with the citizenry.
Grassroots behavior
People at the grassroots are anxious to do something. They are especially anxious to do something MEANINGFUL — at least to them. They are politically-minded people who — when they find a cause worthy of their time, energy, and means — are willing to let go of inhibitions, fears, and preconceptions and jump into the cause with unusual passion.
Motivated grassroots activists can be counted on to carry the burden for any particular political cause. They will make phone calls, label envelopes, knock on doors, organize their friends and relatives, e-mail everybody on their lists, march in the streets, put up yard signs, attend rallies, volunteer for leadership, write letters to editors, lobby VIP's, distribute petitions, donate money, and in countless other ways make great personal sacrifice for what they believe in.
They do these things because of their belief in the ideals that define what it means to be an American. Nearly all true grassroots activists in our nation — unlike establishment authorities who control the political process (including those in academia and the media) — are thus FUNDAMENTALLY CONSERVATIVE. They are at least believers in the sanctity of American's founding ideals and are inclined to support the causes of economic liberty, natural law, and moral responsibility. They are rock-solid, sincere Americans.
And there are literally millions who fit this description. Given the right conditions, they will perform yeoman work indispensable to the success of any major political movement.
Activating the grassroots
The real grassroots strength of America has never been fully tapped, at least not since our founding, when a large proportion of common citizens rose up and made a difference. Whatever grassroots activity we see today is restricted mainly to those individuals who are the most assertive or outspoken. Millions of others would join these visible activists — in every movement from pro-life to pro-marriage to pro-Second Amendment to pro-property rights — if they knew where to turn for adequate leadership, and if they understood how far America has steadily moved toward the brink of social and political collapse. Unfortunately, the grassroots remain largely dormant, due to the fact that even principled political leaders have never learned to fully inspire the grassroots to meaningful action or enlist their full help.
Again, it is important to stress that virtually all truly grassroots activists are sympathetic to moral conservatism. The lawless radicals we often see on the news holding America hostage are not genuine grassroots. They tend to be avant-garde elitists from academia whose main interest is dismantling America's traditions, in preparation for a world of government-dictated servility. They take their orders from above — not below. They are an extension of top-down plans for disrupting our society, not common Americans who sincerely want to preserve our nation from their position at the bottom of the political spectrum. True grassroots activism springs from ordinary citizens and tends toward principled American liberty, not dependency on increased government power.
That being the case — all those who would like to mobilize the grassroots for a particular purpose must, themselves, embody and follow ideals that are consistent with those of America's founding, or the grassroots won't rise to the occasion. This doesn't mean simply rallying citizens to the cause of preserving our nation — although that is essential. It means respecting and exemplifying the very principles that rallied our forebears: treating the grassroots as equals; respecting the grassroots' need for freedom; and recognizing that no one controls the grassroots from the top down.
Below are principles for working with the grassroots, based on the typical behavior of those who join grassroots movements. These principles cannot be divorced from any serious attempt to reclaim America through broad grassroots activism.
- The most important thing to remember in dealing with the grassroots is that the grassroots can't be "managed." You can enlist them, but you can't centrally contain, restrain, or coerce them. Any attempt to manage, manipulate, govern, direct, exploit, or otherwise "use" the grassroots from the top down will fail, because such oversight is intrinsically antithetical — even offensive — to grassroots activism. Instead, those who seek to involve the grassroots in their cause must largely defer to the grassroots, even cater to the grassroots' vision of the cause at issue. People at the grassroots can be led — within certain inviolable principles — but they can't be made subservient.
- The secret to enlisting the enthusiastic support of the grassroots is to inspire citizens with patriotic, common-sense rhetoric that defines a cause worthy of their wholehearted support. Most Americans respond positively to sincere appeals to preserving America's distinctive ideals, and the more intelligent and sensible the appeal, the more effective. Any demagoguery or other calculated "motivational" techniques may rally some people for the short-term — but only the truth, spoken plainly and courageously without attempts at manipulation, will mobilize broad grassroots activity for the long haul. The goal is to persuade with reason, in a way that naturally evokes passionate support for the movement at hand.
- Once inspired, grassroots activists want meaningful work to do. The role of organizers, therefore — besides inspiring the grassroots — is to give interested activists well-prepared resources that they can use to make their own unique contribution to the common cause. In fact, that is mainly all that enthusiastic activists need from those at the top of their movement. With a variety of good resources from which to choose — including self-instructional handbooks, guidelines for potential activities, effective literature, quality signs, comprehensive contact information, up-to-date voter and party lists, and other useful resources — volunteers are ready to hit the streets in search of opportunities to make a difference.
- Those at the top of the movement need to see THEMSELVES mainly as RESOURCES. Since they can't do anything directly to "control" the movement, once it begins to attract strong activists, they will be most influential if they adopt a posture of doing all they can to help those below them. In fact, that is the essence of good leadership. Motivated grassroots followers will respond well to leaders who see themselves primarily as supports to those in the trenches. They will respond poorly to leaders who cross the line and try to use those in the trenches to further their own well-laid plans.
- The grassroots absolutely must be trusted to take initiative. Because being "grassroots" is mainly an attitude that centers in wanting to preserve freedom, those who wish to mobilize the grassroots for a particular cause must respect and even nurture the attitude of freedom and creativity that is the very reason those at the grassroots are involved in the cause in the first place. Just as important, grassroots organizers must realize that there is more talent, wisdom, experience, and expertise concentrated at the grassroots than there is at the top of any political movement. Activists must be allowed — indeed, they must be ENCOURAGED — to take broad initiative and be creative in furthering the cause at issue. The results will exceed anything that detailed planning or micro-management by their leaders will ever produce.
- Although grassroots workers need freedom in which to function, they also appreciate reasonable guidance to help them know how to participate effectively with others in a cooperative effort. Few grassroots activists expect unrestrained freedom to do whatever they choose in a major political movement. Most prefer — and expect — sensible leadership from experienced grassroots activists to guide them in working productively with others. A movement's leaders would therefore be well-advised to offer grassroots volunteers clear written guidelines for working collectively. The only problem with doing so arises when published or "official"-sounding guidelines lack common sense or treat volunteers without due respect. All "top-down" policies in a political movement must be self-evidently reasonable, or workers at the grassroots will quickly lose confidence in those who seek to lead.
Conclusion
These simple principles for organizing grassroots activists will — if followed at least in spirit — unleash the power of the grassroots to accomplish great things in the political arena, on a scale never before seen.
America wasn't built by stifling the individuality of free-thinking idealists. Nor will it be saved by such means. Those who intend to renew American liberty and character need to lead the grassroots to cultural and political dominance on the grassroots' own terms.
These simple principles for organizing grassroots activists will — if followed at least in spirit — unleash the power of the grassroots to accomplish great things in the political arena, on a scale never before seen.
America wasn't built by stifling the individuality of free-thinking idealists. Nor will it be saved by such means. Those who intend to renew American liberty and character need to lead the grassroots to cultural and political dominance on the grassroots' own terms.
A rally of 5,000 that resulted from the grassroots march depicted
in the photos above — video of which was re-played for several days on local TV
stations prior to the rally. Both the march and the rally, which occurred in
2000, were staged entirely by a small group of volunteer activists.
-----------------
Tools and Tips for winning elections
Grassroots Politics
3 Tips for Successfully Using Volunteers in Your Campaign
Should Your Campaign Bother with Voter Registration Drives?
Running a Successful Absentee Voter Program for Your Campaign
The Fundamental Rules for Setting Up a Strong Grassroots Field Operation
How to Create a Local Campaign Organization to Help You Win
The Ultimate Guide: Successful Door-to-Door Campaigning
How to Use Voter Blitzes to Build Excitement for Your Campaign
How to be a Successful Big City Pol
Beginner’s Guide to Grassroots Campaigning
Article Categories
- Message and Strategy
- Fundraising
- Campaign Communications
- Grassroots Politics
- Political Organization
- Miscellaneous
-------------
How to organise and facilitate meetings effectively
Posted By
Steven.
Oct 13 2006 11:13
Oct 13 2006 11:13
Tags
·
groups
Share
Related
Advice and tips on how to organise meetings which fulfil
their purpose efficiently.
One thing central to any functional group is regular
meetings. In a healthy organisation almost all decisions will be made at these
meetings and there will be a sufficient level of discussion to ensure all those
attending have a good idea of the activity and arguments in the different
struggles the organisation is involved in. Meetings might also have some time
given over to education.
Before the meeting
Make sure everyone knows the time and place
A new group or one engaged in a lot of activity should meet at least once a week, at the same time and day. It helps to establish a consistent meeting day, time and location, as soon as possible so people can make it a habit. If they have to search for you or keep track of an ever-changing meeting time, they're far more likely to forget or not to bother. You'll want a space that's private enough for you to have strong disagreements in and where only the members of the group will be while you are using it. This could mean a private room in a quiet pub that would be glad for the additional customers on quiet nights!
Make sure everyone knows the time and place
A new group or one engaged in a lot of activity should meet at least once a week, at the same time and day. It helps to establish a consistent meeting day, time and location, as soon as possible so people can make it a habit. If they have to search for you or keep track of an ever-changing meeting time, they're far more likely to forget or not to bother. You'll want a space that's private enough for you to have strong disagreements in and where only the members of the group will be while you are using it. This could mean a private room in a quiet pub that would be glad for the additional customers on quiet nights!
Develop an agenda
An agenda gives people time to plan, to think over things that will be discussed, to do assignments and bring necessary information and materials. It doesn't have to be set in stone - you can always add and adjust as needed, even during the meeting.
An agenda gives people time to plan, to think over things that will be discussed, to do assignments and bring necessary information and materials. It doesn't have to be set in stone - you can always add and adjust as needed, even during the meeting.
The agenda can be printed and distributed, either in
advance or at the meeting. Or, it can be written on a chalkboard or whiteboard
where everyone can see it. This helps keep people on topic and lets them know
what will be covered and when. If its known who is chairing the meeting in
advance it may be a good idea for that person to start the meeting with a
suggested agenda.
An agenda should include all of the following items that
apply to your group:
1. Additions and approval of the agenda,
2. Reading, corrections, and approval of the previous meeting's minutes,
3. Announcements and correspondence to be dealt with,
4. Treasurer's report,
5. Committee reports,
6. Unfinished business (issues left over from previous meetings),
7. New business.
If there is any disagreement over the order of the agenda then this should be quickly discussed and voted on at the start of the meeting. If the chair thinks there is a lot to get through it may make sense to set a maximum amount of time that can be spent discussing particular topics right at the start of the meeting.
1. Additions and approval of the agenda,
2. Reading, corrections, and approval of the previous meeting's minutes,
3. Announcements and correspondence to be dealt with,
4. Treasurer's report,
5. Committee reports,
6. Unfinished business (issues left over from previous meetings),
7. New business.
If there is any disagreement over the order of the agenda then this should be quickly discussed and voted on at the start of the meeting. If the chair thinks there is a lot to get through it may make sense to set a maximum amount of time that can be spent discussing particular topics right at the start of the meeting.
Make sure the room is open and set up properly
Have you ever arrived at a meeting only to find the door locked, and everyone had to stand around waiting while the facilitator scrambled to find the key? Or have you ever been in a meeting where there weren't enough chairs, and each time a latecomer arrived, they had to interrupt and search for one and move it in? Not especially effective ways of inspiring confidence and credibility or getting things done efficiently, are they? Try and arrange the room so that everyone sits in a circle and make sure you are seated where you can see everyone.
Have you ever arrived at a meeting only to find the door locked, and everyone had to stand around waiting while the facilitator scrambled to find the key? Or have you ever been in a meeting where there weren't enough chairs, and each time a latecomer arrived, they had to interrupt and search for one and move it in? Not especially effective ways of inspiring confidence and credibility or getting things done efficiently, are they? Try and arrange the room so that everyone sits in a circle and make sure you are seated where you can see everyone.
During the meeting
Start as you mean to continue
Make sure you start on time. This is especially important for newcomers, who can get a bit put-off by the meeting start time being increasingly pushed back while people chat or wander around. First thing to do is make sure everyone knows who everyone else is. As clichéd as it may be - have a 'go-round' and get people to say their names and maybe a bit of other info about themselves. Next up make sure someone has volunteered to facilitate the meeting (who will have the agenda, and make sure the meeting flows smoothly) and someone else is taking decent notes of the meeting. Its important that the same people don't end up doing these tasks every meeting, perhaps the best way to tackle this is to have a list of everyone willing to chair and each week take the next person on the list.
Start as you mean to continue
Make sure you start on time. This is especially important for newcomers, who can get a bit put-off by the meeting start time being increasingly pushed back while people chat or wander around. First thing to do is make sure everyone knows who everyone else is. As clichéd as it may be - have a 'go-round' and get people to say their names and maybe a bit of other info about themselves. Next up make sure someone has volunteered to facilitate the meeting (who will have the agenda, and make sure the meeting flows smoothly) and someone else is taking decent notes of the meeting. Its important that the same people don't end up doing these tasks every meeting, perhaps the best way to tackle this is to have a list of everyone willing to chair and each week take the next person on the list.
Minute taking
Someone should be responsible every week for keeping minutes of the meeting and preparing these to be read at or distributed before the next meeting. Minutes need not be very detailed (you don't need to write down what everyone says). They should aim to include:
1. Who attended the meeting,
2. Topics discussed,
3. Decisions reached for each topic,
4. Who has volunteered to do what,
5. Items to be discussed at next meeting (and when that will be). Read more on taking minutes
Someone should be responsible every week for keeping minutes of the meeting and preparing these to be read at or distributed before the next meeting. Minutes need not be very detailed (you don't need to write down what everyone says). They should aim to include:
1. Who attended the meeting,
2. Topics discussed,
3. Decisions reached for each topic,
4. Who has volunteered to do what,
5. Items to be discussed at next meeting (and when that will be). Read more on taking minutes
Encourage group discussion to get all points of view
Turn questions back to the group for their input. Ask people to comment on something just said. Compliment people on their ideas and thank them for their input. Ask open-ended questions. You may need to ask the more quiet people for their thoughts, and tactfully interrupt the longwinded ones to move the discussion along. Encourage people who just want to agree with a previous speaker to say "ditto" rather than taking the time to repeat her/his point.
Turn questions back to the group for their input. Ask people to comment on something just said. Compliment people on their ideas and thank them for their input. Ask open-ended questions. You may need to ask the more quiet people for their thoughts, and tactfully interrupt the longwinded ones to move the discussion along. Encourage people who just want to agree with a previous speaker to say "ditto" rather than taking the time to repeat her/his point.
Stay on top of things
It's part of your job as facilitator to manage the traffic and help the discussion move along. If several people are trying to talk at once, ask them to take turns. It helps to have a pen and paper to hand for when things get busy- jot down people's names in the order they raised their hands. It can be a good idea to let people who have not spoken yet to skip the queue and put them at the top of your list. Make sure everyone gets their turn and things keep moving - you might have to start asking some people to keep it short! Often a discussion can become dominated by a couple of speakers, try and avoid this situation by inviting the rest of the people to contribute (going round in a circle and asking for people's views can help).
It's part of your job as facilitator to manage the traffic and help the discussion move along. If several people are trying to talk at once, ask them to take turns. It helps to have a pen and paper to hand for when things get busy- jot down people's names in the order they raised their hands. It can be a good idea to let people who have not spoken yet to skip the queue and put them at the top of your list. Make sure everyone gets their turn and things keep moving - you might have to start asking some people to keep it short! Often a discussion can become dominated by a couple of speakers, try and avoid this situation by inviting the rest of the people to contribute (going round in a circle and asking for people's views can help).
If the discussion is getting off-topic (i.e. it strays
from the agenda), point this out and redirect it back on course. If someone is
getting hostile, argumentative, or needlessly negative, tactfully intervene and
try to turn the discussion in a more constructive direction. If necessary, ask
the group to agree to a time limit on a discussion that might take too long.
You might want to agree to limit each speaker's time, or say that no one can
speak a second time until everyone has spoken once.
If the group is spinning its wheels and people are only
repeating themselves, restate and summarise the issues and ask if people are
near ready to make a decision on the subject. If it just doesn't seem that the
group can make a good decision right now, suggest tabling the matter until
another time. You may want to ask someone to bring back more information, or
form a committee to work on the issue.
Don't use your position as facilitator to impose your
personal ideas and opinions on the group
If you have strong feelings on a particular issue, you may want to step aside and let someone else facilitate that discussion. At the very least, keep your own comments to a minimum, try to let others speak first, and identify them as your personal beliefs, outside of your role as facilitator. Avoid criticising the ideas of others - your position gives your comments undue extra weight.
If you have strong feelings on a particular issue, you may want to step aside and let someone else facilitate that discussion. At the very least, keep your own comments to a minimum, try to let others speak first, and identify them as your personal beliefs, outside of your role as facilitator. Avoid criticising the ideas of others - your position gives your comments undue extra weight.
Non-verbals are important, too
Be attentive to people who are speaking - look at them, lean forward, smile, nod. Make eye contact with people who may need encouragement to speak. Pay attention - people who are less confident about speaking will often indicate that they want to speak in minor way (e.g. briefly half put up their hand). A good chair will spot this and encourage them to speak
Be attentive to people who are speaking - look at them, lean forward, smile, nod. Make eye contact with people who may need encouragement to speak. Pay attention - people who are less confident about speaking will often indicate that they want to speak in minor way (e.g. briefly half put up their hand). A good chair will spot this and encourage them to speak
Don't be afraid of silence
It's a very useful tool. It gives people a chance to consider and collect their thoughts. It may encourage someone to voice a comment they've been thinking about but hesitant to say.
It's a very useful tool. It gives people a chance to consider and collect their thoughts. It may encourage someone to voice a comment they've been thinking about but hesitant to say.
Guide the discussion toward closure
Restate people's comments to make sure everyone understands their point. Ask for clarification. Summarise what has been accomplished or agreed and what is left to resolve. Suggest when it's time to wrap up and make decisions or take action.
Restate people's comments to make sure everyone understands their point. Ask for clarification. Summarise what has been accomplished or agreed and what is left to resolve. Suggest when it's time to wrap up and make decisions or take action.
Decision making
Arguments about how best to reach decisions are fundamental to anarchism. You may wish to leave time for discussion in the hope of being able to reach consensus, only then moving to a vote, or you may wish to go straight to the vote. If time permits it may make sense to postpone making a contentious decision to the next meeting to give people a chance to think things over (and calm down!). Read more on decision making
Arguments about how best to reach decisions are fundamental to anarchism. You may wish to leave time for discussion in the hope of being able to reach consensus, only then moving to a vote, or you may wish to go straight to the vote. If time permits it may make sense to postpone making a contentious decision to the next meeting to give people a chance to think things over (and calm down!). Read more on decision making
Take time at the end of the meeting to process
Reflect on what went well and what people appreciate about others' input and actions. Check out assumptions. Encourage people to share any lingering concerns or things that just don't sit right.
Reflect on what went well and what people appreciate about others' input and actions. Check out assumptions. Encourage people to share any lingering concerns or things that just don't sit right.
End on time
Nothing makes people dread and avoid meetings more than knowing they're likely to go on and on and consume far more of their time than they want to give. Set a time to end the meeting at the very beginning and stick to it!
After the meeting
Minutes
Make sure the minutes will be written up, organised and then distributed among those who attended within a reasonable time scale.
Nothing makes people dread and avoid meetings more than knowing they're likely to go on and on and consume far more of their time than they want to give. Set a time to end the meeting at the very beginning and stick to it!
After the meeting
Minutes
Make sure the minutes will be written up, organised and then distributed among those who attended within a reasonable time scale.
Follow up with people.
Thank them for their input. Make sure they understand assignments and have what they need to do them.
Thank them for their input. Make sure they understand assignments and have what they need to do them.
Now you're done you can start getting ready for the next
meeting!
libcom.org 2005
This text is adapted from work by Mary McGhee and The Struggle Site.
This text is adapted from work by Mary McGhee and The Struggle Site.
------------------
° Renka's
Home Page
° PS103 - U.S. Political Systems syllabus - Spring 2010
° PS360 - Parties and Voting Behavior Syllabus - Fall 2009
° Polling Assignment
° PS103 - U.S. Political Systems syllabus - Spring 2010
° PS360 - Parties and Voting Behavior Syllabus - Fall 2009
° Polling Assignment
The
Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Public Opinion Polls
Russell D. Renka
Professor of Political Science
Southeast Missouri State University
E-Mail: rdrenka@semo.edu
February 22, 2010
Russell D. Renka
Professor of Political Science
Southeast Missouri State University
E-Mail: rdrenka@semo.edu
February 22, 2010
° Polls
v. Reports from Polls
° Sampling Error
° Good Polls
° Bad Polls
° Ugly Polls
° Conclusion
° Polling Links
° Notes
° References
° Sampling Error
° Good Polls
° Bad Polls
° Ugly Polls
° Conclusion
° Polling Links
° Notes
° References
Public opinion polls or
surveys are everywhere today. A nice sampling of professional surveyors
is at Cornell Institute for Social and Economic Research (CISER), Public Opinion Surveys.
The Wikipedia Opinion
poll site has history and methods of this emergent profession that
was pioneered in America, and its Polling
organizations lists some globally distributed polling organizations
in other countries. PollingReport.com
compiles opinion poll results on a wide array of current American political and
commercial topics. USA
Election Polls track the innumerable election-related polls in the
election-rich American political system. The National Council on Public Polls
(NCPP) defines professional standards for and lists its members--but
many polls online and off do not adhere to such standards.
Polls have become
indispensable to finding out what people think and how they behave. They
pervade commercial and political life in America. Poll results are
constantly reported by national and local media to a skeptical public.
Seemingly everyone has been contacted by a pollster or someone posing as
one. There is no escape from the flood of information and disinformation
from polls. The internet has enhanced both the use and misuse of such
polls. Any student therefore should be able to reliably tell a good poll
from a bad one. Bad ones are distressingly commonplace on the web.
What is more, bad polls come in two forms. The more common one is the innocuous
or unintended worthless poll. But there is a far more malevolent form
that I label "ugly" polls. This is a manual for separating good
polls from bad ones, and garden-variety bad from the truly ugly.
Rule One in using
website polls is to access the original source material. The web
is full of polls, and reports about polls. They are not the same
thing. A polling or survey site must contain the actual content of the
poll, specifically the questions that were asked of participants, the dates
during which the poll was done, the number of participants, and the sampling
error (see next section below). Legitimate pollsters give you all
that and more. They also typically have a website page devoted to news
reports based on their polls. The page will include links for the parent
website, including the specific site of the surveys being reported. So
anyone who wants to directly check the information to see if the report is
accurate, may easily do so on the spot.
But once polls are
published, advocate groups rapidly put them to their own uses. Sometimes
they do not show links to the source. For instance, see Scenic America's Opinion
Polls: Billboards are Ugly, Intrusive, Uninformative.
This is a typical advocate group site with a report based on several polls
saying the American people consistently dislike highway billboards. But
the polls are not linked (although this group does cite them properly at the
bottom of their file). Therefore readers either hunt these down or must
take this report's word for it--and that is never a good idea in dealing with
advocate groups! Advocate groups have a bad habit of selectively
reporting only the information that flatters their causes. That should
not be accepted at face value. It's best to draw no conclusion at all
unless one can access the source information for oneself.
& Some advocacy
groups attack legitimate pollsters and polls by distorting their data and
purposes. A Christian conservative group with the name Fathers' Manifesto
produced The
Criminal Gallup Organization to attack this well-known and reputable
pollster for alleged misrepresentation of American public opinion on legalized
abortion. They said "The fact that almost half of their fellow
citizens view the 40 million abortions which have been performed in this country
as the direct result of an unpopular, immoral and unconstitutional act by their
own government, as murder, is an important thing for Americans to know.
This is not a trivial point, yet the Gallup Organization took it upon itself to
trivialize it by removing any and all references to these facts from their web
site." (Abortion
Polls by the Criminal Gallup Organization) That was followed
with a link to the offender's URL at www.gallup.com/poll/indicators/indabortion.asp,
now a dead URL. The truth is far simpler than conspiracy. In late
2002, Gallup went private on the web with nearly all its regular issue sets,
not excepting abortion. One will only know this by escaping the confines
of an advocate group's narrow perspective and seeing the targeted poll and
pollster's own take on the issue. And that can now readily be done, via
the newer Gallup site's search using "abortion polls." That
produces an Abortion
In Depth Review summary of numerous polls dating from 1975 at this
URL: www.gallup.com/poll/9904/Public-Opinion-About-Abortion-InDepth-Review.aspx.
It demonstrates that 12 to 21 percent of Americans would prefer that
abortions be "illegal in all circumstances"; but of course (for
reasons cited below), the word "murder" is not employed.
The lesson is that any
poll-based report must make the full source information available to its
readership. There is no excuse for not identifying the source or directly
linking to the source. If they do neither, it's grounds for suspicion
that they want you to take their word as the final authority. That is not
acceptable conduct in the world of polls and surveys. I do not mean the
report must literally attach links, although that's never a bad idea. But
they must identify the source in such a way that anyone can then do a standard
search and examine the original source material.1
This elementary term
must be properly understood before we go further. "Sampling
error" is a built-in and unavoidable feature of all proper polls.
The purpose of polls is not to get direct information about a sample
alone. It is to learn about the "mother set" of all those from
which a poll's sample is randomly drawn.2
This "population" consists of everyone or everything we wish to
understand via our sample. A particular population is defined by the
questions we ask. It might be "all flips of a given coin" or
"all presidential election voters in the 2008 American general
election" or "all batteries sold by our firm in calendar 2008"
or "all aerial evasions of predatory bats by moths" or "all
deep-sky galaxies" or any number of other targets. The object is not
to poll the whole population, but rather to draw a sample from it and directly
poll them for sake of authoring an "inference" or judgment about that
population. But all samples have an inherent property: they
fluctuate from one sample to the next one as each is drawn at random from the
elements of the targeted population. This natural property is
"sampling error" or "margin of error" (Mystery
Pollster: What does the margin of error mean?). These
are not surveyor's mistakes, but rather are inherent properties of all sampling
(SESTAT's Understanding
Sampling Errors). Cautions on reading and interpreting these
are at PollingReport's Sampling
Error (Taylor 1998) or Robert Niles' Margin of Error.
Sampling error tells us
the possible distance of a population's true attribute from a directly found
sample attribute. You cannot assume any sample's measured properties
(such as mean and standard deviation) is exactly like the population's
properties. The sweet part of sampling error is that we can easily calculate
how large it is. This is chiefly defined by the number of units in the
sample. You can use the DSS
Research Sample Error Calculator to determine this (also: American
Research Group's Margin
of Error Calculator). Or first specify a desired accuracy
level, and find out what size sample will achieve that (Creative Research
Systems, Sample
Size Calculator).
People tend to believe
that samples must be a significantly large part of a population from which
they're drawn. That is simply wrong. Asher (2001) cites the fallacy
of thinking that cooks testing the broth or blood testers taking red and white
cells must take some appreciable portion of the whole. Thank goodness,
neither of those is necessary. I like to cite coin flips, because the
population of "all flips of a coin" is some undefined huge number,
yet we routinely test coins for heads-to-tails fairness with a mere 500 to 1000
flips. Our sampling error for 1000 flips is just 3.1% or 31 flips; so we
predict that a fair coin produces 500 heads plus-or-minus 31. We
don't mind the huge population size (all coin flips). In fact, we prefer
that it be very large, because that way our extraction of a sample has no
appreciable effect on the leftover items from that population.3
The DSS Calculator
also permits us to seek different levels of assurance about the sampling
error. We call this "confidence level" or "confidence
interval." Customarily we accept a 95% level, meaning that our 1000
flips will go above or below the 3.1% only 1 time in every 20 samples. We
get 500 heads plus or minus 31 on 19 trials out of 20. If that
isn't good enough for the cautious, they can select 99% instead, and that
produces a larger sampling error (about 4.1%) for a more cautious inference
about the mother set of flips; and now we predict 500 heads plus-or-minus 41.
Polls can be custom-fit for different accuracy demands.
All polls are surveys
based on samples drawn from parent populations. A poll's purpose is to
make accurate inferences about that population from what is directly learned
about the sample through questions the sampled persons answer. Knowledge
of the sample is just a means to that end. All good polls follow three
indispensable standard requirements of scientific polling.
First, the questions
must be worded in a clear and neutral fashion. Avoid wording that
will bias subjects toward or away from a particular point of view. The
object is to discover what respondents think, not to influence or alter
it. Along with clear wording is an appropriate set of options for the
subject to choose. It makes no sense to ask someone's income level down
to the dollar; just put in options that are sufficiently broad that most
respondents can accurately place themselves. A scan of good polls
generally shows the "no opinion" option as well. That's to
capture the commonplace fact that many people have no feelings or judgments one
way or the other on the survey question. If obliged to choose only from
"True" or "False," many who have no opinion will flip the
coin and check off one of those options. Thus a warning: the
business of fashioning truly effective survey questions is not easy. Even
the best polls have problems with fashioning their questions to avoid bias,
confusion, and distortion (Asher 2001, 44-61). Roper illustrates this via
a confusing double negative causing a high proportion of respondents to opt for
a Holocaust-denial reply, whereas a more clearly worded question showed that
this radical view is held by a tiny proportion of respondents (Ladd 1994, Roper
Holocaust Polls; Kagay 1994, Poll
on Doubt Of Holocaust Is Corrected - The New York Times). It
usually takes a professional like Professor Ladd to parse out such distinctions
in question wording among valid polls. This is where determined issue
advocates can be valuable, because many watch out for subtle differences in
question wording that can alter responses to the advocate's pet issue (for
example, Mooney 2003, Polling
for Intelligent Design). But with some practice it's still
feasible for any alert reader to see the difference between properly worded
questions and the rest.
The rest fall into two
categories: amateur work, and deliberate distortion. A great many
website polls exhibit amateurs at work, with highly imprecise or fuzzy wording
of questions. I'll not bother to show these by links, since their numbers
are legion all over the web. The deliberate abusers are less
common. These are discussed later on under "ugly polls."
Second, the subjects in
the sample must be randomly selected (Research Methods Knowledge
Base: Random
Selection & Assignment). The term "random" does
not mean haphazard or nonscientific. Quite the opposite, it means
every subject in a targeted or parent population (such as "all U.S.
citizens who voted in the 1996 general election for president") has the
same chance of being sampled as any other. Think of it like tumbling and
pulling out a winning lottery number on a State of Kentucky television spot;
they are publicly showing that winning Powerball numbers are selected fairly by
showing that any of the numbers can emerge on each round of selection (Kentucky Lottery).
Fairness means every number has identical likelihood
of being the winning number, no matter what players might believe about lucky
or unlucky numbers. So "random" means lacking a pattern (such
as more heads than tails in coin flips, or more of one dice number than the
other five on tumbled dice) by which someone can discover a bias and thereby
predict a result (Random
number generation - Wikipedia). That's a powerful property, as
only random selection is truly "fair" (unbiased on which outcome
occurs). Any deviation from random produces biased selection, and that's
one of the hallmarks of bad polls.
Granted, national pollsters
cannot literally select persons at random from all U.S. citizenry or residents,
because no one has a comprehensive list of all names (despite what conspiracy
theorists want to believe). So they substitute a similar method, of
random digit dialing or "RDD" based on telephone exchanges (Random
digit dialing - Wikipedia). Or the U.S. Census Bureau will do
block sampling; that is, they will randomly select city or town blocks for
direct contact of sample subjects (Data Access Tools from
the Census Bureau; or direct to Accuracy
of the Data 2004). Emergent web polls do the same from their
mother population of potential subjects. These honor the principle of
pure random selection by coming as close to that method as available
information allows.
It is not perfect
stuff. Green and Gerber have long argued that there are better methods
than RDD for pre-election polling (Green
and Gerber 2002). There are also serious issues among
telephone pollsters over household reliance on cell phones only, as that is
disproportionately true of younger households which may therefore be excluded
using landline RDD procedures (Blumenthal 2007, Mystery
Pollster: Cell Phones and Political Surveys: Part I, 3 July
2007; Part
II, 13 July 2007). That problem is being handled in a manner
resembling block sampling to approximate a true random sample (Asher 2005,
74-77; Pew Research Center - Keeter, Dimock and Christian 2008a, The Impact Of
"Cell-Onlys" On Public Opinion Polling: Ways of Coping with a
Growing Population Segment, 31 January 2008; Keeter 2008, Latest
Findings on Cell Phones and Polling, 23 May 2008; Keeter, Dimock and
Christian 2008b, Cell
Phones and the 2008 Vote: An Update, 23 September 2008).
But this does not change the underlying principle of seeking a random sample.4
Third, the survey or
poll must be sufficiently large that the built-in sampling error is
reasonably small. Sampling error is the natural variation that occurs
from taking samples. We don't expect a sample of 500 flips of a coin will
produce exactly the same heads/tails distribution as a second sample of
500. But the larger the samples are, the less the natural variation from
one to another. Common experience tells us this--or it should. A
sample of newborn babies listed in large city birth registers will show
approximately (but not exactly) the same proportion of boys and girls in each
city, or in one city each time the register is revisited; but in small towns
there are large variation in boy-to-girl ratios. Generally, we do not
want sampling error to be larger than about 5 percent. That requires
about 400 or more subjects, without subdivisions among groups within the
sample. If you divide the sample evenly into male and female subgroups,
then you naturally get larger sampling errors for each 200-person
subgroup. Ken Blake's guide entitled "The Ten
Commandments of Polling" provides a step by step guide to
calculate sampling errors via calculator for any given sample size; and you can
go on line to the DSS
Calculator for that. The sound theoretical grounding is in any
standard book on statistics and probability, in manuals with scientific
calculators, and in several websites listed below.
Remember another rule
about sample size. It does no harm that the sample is extremely
small in number compared to the target population. Consider coin flips as
a sample designed to test the inherent fairness of a coin. There is
virtually no limit to number of possible flips of a coin. You want to
know if the coin is fair, meaning that half of all flips will be heads and half
tails. So "all flips" is the population you want to know
about. "Actual flips" are the sample. You can never know
what "all flips" looks like, but that's OK. The key to accurate
judgment of "all flips" is to make sure you have a large enough
sample of actual flips. Asher (2005, 78) gives a similar example of
taking a small proportion of one's billions of red blood cells to take its
profile, or a chef sampling soup before serving it. Statisticians refer
to a law of large numbers, and it's explained at many sites like The Why
Files, Obey
the Law.
If all three of these
criteria are met, you have reasonable assurance the poll is good. How can
you know this? Expect all poll reports to honor the journalists'
rule. They must cite all the information necessary to let you
confirm the three conditions. Even a brief news report can cite the
method of selection (such as "nationwide telephone sample obtained by
random digit dialing, on October 5-6, 1996"), the sample size and sampling
error (1000 subjects, with sampling error of plus-or-minus 3.1 percent at a 95%
confidence level), and the questions used in that survey. For more
extended print articles there are fuller guidelines (Gawiser and Witt undated, 20 Questions A Journalist Should
Ask About Poll Results, Third Edition). Still, most reports of
poll results will not reproduce the poll questions in full for you to see; too
little space in papers, too little time on television or radio. So they
must provide a link to the original source for the full set of questions.
With websites now universally available, no pollster can plausibly slip that
responsibility. Neither can any reputable news organization.
The New York Times
offers a brief review on how modern polling has expanded and been revised, at
Michael Kagay's Poll
Watch Looking Back on 25 Years of Changes in Polling. I
recommend this for those seeking more detail.
In conclusion: all
three criteria must be met for a poll to be judged "good." The
burden of proof is on the pollster or those who use and report from it.
In turn, students shouldn't report poll information only from a secondary
source. Instead, a web news source that summarizes the relevant
information should also be linked to the primary source. You should also
check the primary source to ascertain that the information was correctly
interpreted by the reporter.
So when is a poll not
good? Simply enough, it only has to violate any of the three rules
specified above. The one emphasized here is violation of random
selection--because that's the prevalent website violation.
The web is filled with
sites inviting you to participate by posting your opinion. This amounts
to creation of samples via self-selection.
That trashes the principle of random selection, where everyone in a target
population has the same likelihood of being in the sample. A proper
medical experiment never permits someone to choose whether to receive a
medication rather than the placebo. No; subjects are randomly placed in
either the "experimental group" (gets the treatment) or the
"control group" (gets the sugar-coated placebo). If you can
call or e-mail yourself into a sample, why would you believe the sample was
randomly selected from the population? It won't be. It consists of
persons interested enough or perhaps abusive enough to want their voices
heard. Participation feels good, but it is not random selection from the
parent population.
Next, remember
this: any self-selected sample is basically worthless as a source
of information about the population beyond itself. This is the single
main reason for the famous failure of the Literary Digest election poll
in 1936, where the Digest sampled 2.27 million owners of telephones and
automobiles to decide that Franklin Roosevelt would lose the election to Republican
Alfred Landon, who'd win 57 percent of the national popular vote (History
Matters, Landon
in a Landslide: The Poll That Changed Polling). Landon
didn't! Dave Leip's Atlas of Presidential Elections, 1936
Presidential Election Results, displays the 36.54% won by Landon
below the 60.80% of national popular vote won by the incumbent Roosevelt.
This even though the Digest had affirmed of its straw poll:
"The Poll represents the most extensive straw ballot in the field--the
most experienced in view of its twenty-five years of perfecting--the most
unbiased in view of its prestige--a Poll that has always previously been
correct." (Landon
in a Landslide) Yeah, but a lot of 1936 depression-era
Roosevelt voters didn't own telephones or automobiles so never received the
opportunity to voice their opinions.
So if they are
worthless, why are they so commonplace? Self-selected polls are highly
useful for certain legitimate but limited purposes. Sellers always want
to know more about their customers; but such customer surveys are necessarily
self-selected rather than selection as a random sample. Suppose you are
an internet seller such as Amazon. You try for a profile of customers by
inviting them to give you some feedback. This helps you discover new
things about them, gives tips on who else you'd want to reach, alerts you to
trouble spots in advance, and lets you decide how to promote new
products. But none of this is to discover the nature of the parent
population. It's to know more about those customers who care enough to
respond. All such samples are not random; they are biased via
self-selection to include mostly the interested, the opinionated, the
passionate, and the site-addicted. All the rest are silent and therefore
unknown. So long as you understand this limitation, it is perfectly fine
to invite the "roar of the crowd" from your customers.
Now suppose your
self-selected sample is very large, and you cannot study all of it. Then
define that total sample as your population (called "all site
visitors"), and seek a sample within it for intensive study.
But that takes random sampling from the population. Inviting some of your
site visitors to fill out surveys won't tell you about "all site
visitors." Instead you get the relative few who bother to reply, and
they are probably untypical of the rest. So smart sellers who really want
to know all their traffic seek to establish a full list of all customers--by
posting cookies to their computers, by getting telephone numbers at checkout
counters to produce comprehensive customer lists, or by telling you to go
online to get a warranty validated whereupon you must show them an email
address and telephone to get the job done. Understand, though, that smart
businesses do this to avoid hearing only from an untypical few of their
customers.
The dangers of
self-selection may seem obvious by now, yet flagrant violations of random
selection have sometimes received polite and promotional treatment in the
press. Shere Hite has made a successful career writing on the habits and
mores of modern women. In 1987 she hit the headlines and made $3 million
selling a book based upon a mail survey of 4500 American women derived from a
baseline sample of 100,000 women drawn from lists compiled in various women's
magazines. The highlight was a report that well over half her sample of
women married five or more years were having one or more extramarital
affairs. That got Hite oceans of free publicity and celebrity
tours. Yet the Hite 4500 were a heavily self-selected sample who chose to
respond to Hite's invitation to disclose sensitive matters of private and
personal beliefs and behavior. This outraged legitimate surveyors, who
know that any "response rate" (percentage of those surveyed who
submit to the questions) below 60 percent invites distortion of the sample in
favor of the vocal and opinionated few. A response rate of 4.5 percent
clearly will not do.
That low response-rate
samples invite bias is well known from congressional offices inviting citizen
responses to franked mail inquiries. It mainly draws responses from those
who have some knowledge and interest in public affairs and who feel
favorably toward that Member of Congress. In Hite's case, most knew and
cared little about her or her very strongly held opinions on feminism and
man-woman relations. But a few did. Those divided into persons who
liked and shared Hite's basic views, and those who didn't. The friendlies
were far more likely to fill out and mail back the survey. So Hite got a
biased sample of Hite supporters. This is non-response bias:
her sample was stacked with angry and dissatisfied women who were much more
likely than the 95.5 percent non-responders to have had affairs outside of
marriage and to tell that (Singer in Rubenstein 1995, 133-136; T.W. Smith 1989,
Sex
Counts: A Methodological Critique of Hite's "Women and Love",
pp. 537-547 with this conclusion: "In the marketplace of scientific
ideas, Hite's work would be found in the curio shop of the bazaar of pop
and pseudoscience.").
It could be that those
who do not share Hite's views systematically select themselves out of
her sample, while those sharing her views select themselves in. Or
it could be that her original sample was drawn in a way that violates random
selection with respect to the questions about which she was inquiring. Or
some combination of these. Whatever it is, we finish with a highly biased
sample from which one cannot draw valid inferences on those questions about the
population of all American women or even from her original 100,000
mail-list. Low response rate is a well-known pitfall. Alongside the
Hite example, it is one of the many mistakes committed by the infamous Literary
Digest polls (Squire 1988; Rubenstein 1995, 63-67).
Biased samples are not
automatically shunned by marketers. Sometimes they are a welcomed
thing. Members of Congress use their congressional franking privileges to
conduct district mail surveys that are irredeemably flawed by self-selection of
the samples (Stolarek, Rood and Taylor 1981). Citizens who like that
office holder are much more likely to respond to the query. So are those
with high interest in the subject matter. Thus the sample leans heavily
to those who like its sponsor and care about its questions. These queries
produce a predictably biased set of responses favoring the point of view held
by the politician. This pleases most politicians, who are practiced in
arts of self-promotion and recognize a favorable data source when they see
one. Typically these franked-letter survey questionnaires are followed by
another franked report summarizing the results in a way that validates the
Member's policy program.
The most spectacular
example of deliberate creation of a biased sample is associated with the annual
voting culminated in May of 2001 through 2008 on American Idol. American Idol FAQs
explains how to vote once an Idol show is completed. Voting by
voice is done to toll-free numbers, but there's also the option of text
messaging. The FAQ site says "if you vote using Cingular Wireless
Text Messaging, standard Text Messaging fees will apply." The show
is tremendously popular, and voting requires waiting in line, unless the text
message option is used. Cingular does not disallow repeat messaging, for
the baldly obvious reason that it charges a fee per message. Thus FAQ
says "input the word VOTE into a new text message on your cell phone and
send this message to the 4 digit short number assigned to your contestant of
choice (such as 5701 for contestant 1). Only send the word 'VOTE' to the
4 digit numbers you see on screen, you cannot send a text message to the
toll-free numbers." That's right, there are two separate procedures,
one for toll free lines with slow one-at-a-time votes and then slow waits for
another crack at it, another for fast repeat voting with fees to Cingular via
text messaging. That's a positive invitation to creation of a highly
biased sample.
Biased samples can also
be dangerous to democratic standards of voting for public office. The
most important self-selected population in the political world is the voting
citizenry in democratic elections. Serious political elections are
obliged to follow three strict standards of fairness: each individual
voter gets to vote only once, no voter's ballot can be revealed or traced back
to that person, and every vote that is cast gets counted as a cast vote in the
appropriate jurisdictional locale. Internet voting is heralded as a
coming thing, but so far the experience with it is studded with instances of
ballot tampering by creative hackers. That tampering is a violation of
the third condition, that cast votes are counted properly. ElectionsOnline.us--Enabling Online
Voting (URL: www.electionsonline.us/)
assures us that it "makes possible secure and foolproof online voting for
your business or organization," but hackers have demonstrated that
security is a relative term. AP
Wire 06-21-2003 UCR student arrested for allegedly trying to derail election
cites a campus hacker who demonstrated in July 2003 how a student election for
president could be altered through repeat voting. That's documented
online by Sniggle.net: The Culture Jammer's Encyclopedia, in their Election Jam
section (URL: sniggle.net/index.php
> sniggle.net/election.php);
and there are other sources as well.
Indeed this campus
hacker is not an isolated case. After 2000 the U.S. Department of Defense
set forth a Federal Voting Assistance Project project called SERVE (Secure
Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment). This was an ambitious
pilot plan to enable overseas military personnel from seven states to vote
online in the 2004 national election (formerly available at Welcome to the SERVE
home page at www.serveusa.gov/public/aca.aspx,
but now gone - RDR, September 2005). The ultimate goal was to permit the
several million overseas voters to register in their counties and vote by
secure on-line links. But on 20 January 2004, four co-authors with
specialties in computer security produced a potent indictment of the
shortcomings of SERVE in terms of potential election fraud. The prospects
of hacking into the system to stack the ballot box are daunting barriers to a
system that must also secure the individual's anonymity. Commercial
security lacks any comparable requirement to ensure that the individual
participant's true identity remain unknown.5 (Jefferson
et al., 2004, A
Security Analysis of the Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment
(SERVE); also John Schwartz, Report
Says Internet Voting System Is Too Insecure to Use, New York
Times, 1/21/04) As a result, the Pentagon wisely scrapped plans to
use online voting for 2004, in part due to a State of Maryland demonstration of
how easily a skilled hacker can break locks and alter voter identity paper
trails (Report
from a Review of the Voting System in The State of Maryland, 12
October 2006). Yet even that damning evidence has not deterred one
prominent manufacturer of on-line voting machines from nonetheless claiming
their system is foolproof.6
So a 'vigorous debate'
supposedly exists over how to insulate website voting against the danger of
fraud and altered results via ballot box stuffing. It clearly pays to be
deeply skeptical of those who claim on-line voting is immune from dangers of
getting a distorted sample. That is an extreme form of the self-selection
inherent to all elections, which count recorded votes rather than opinions from
the whole electorate.
Bad polls on the web do
not include election results but are nonetheless remarkably abundant.
These fall into two basic categories. First are amateur bad polls.
The web is positively overflowing with these. These show self-selection
and other errors like small sample sizes or badly worded questions. Some
are simply interactive web pages created for fun and dialogue with
others. They often make no pretense of being legitimate surveys.
Some are self-evidently not serious. They all tend to have certain common
signs of amateurs at work. For one, there are frequent wrongly spelled
words. For another, the questions are worded in vague or unclear ways
that may be typical of everyday speech but are strictly not allowed at
legitimate polling sites. Sometimes these are humorous sites with gonzo
questions about a variety of current news items, especially those of salacious
or bizarre nature. Others are accompanied with blogs that really amount
to ranting licenses. Amateur bad polls are very easy to recognize on a
little inspection. Their samples are running tallies determined by
whoever has chosen to participate one or more times. They lack any
"sampling error" because they're just running tallies of recorded
responses, not samples taken at random from a population.
The second category of
bad polls is the sophisticated bad poll. These are more
serious. Self-selection along with a seller's denial of the problem are
their hallmarks. They are professionally presented on the web, they do
not have the obvious spelling and grammatical failures, and they customarily
ask questions in a manner similar to legitimate polls. These are not
the work of amateurs. Surface level recognition of their failings is much
harder to recognize. Shere Hite's 1987 poll is a pre-web era example of
this genre. Its purveyor defended the poll vigorously and insisted upon
its legitimacy as the real thing. So do current offenders, as we shall
see.
A website example of
this practice is PulsePoll.community
Network, which in Spring 2000 ran four pre-primary polls for the New
Hampshire, Arizona, Washington and Colorado presidential primaries (at PulsePoll
Primary: Arizona Results). They got very similar results to
four scientific telephone-based polls taken on the eve of these four
events. So they concluded that "The PulsePoll has made Internet
polling history" with a web poll emulating telephone surveys in its
forecasting accuracy. But this claim does not bear close
examination. Objections from professional survey sources came in
immediately. Some are captured in Jeff Mapes' article of 12 April 2000
entitled "Web Pollster Hopes To Win Credibility" in PulsePoll.com
News The Oregonian. Even if four spring 2000 primary polls did
closely resemble legitimate survey results, that could be pure luck. One
should remember that the Literary Digest also used wrong sampling
methods to correctly pick presidential winners in four straight elections from
1920 through 1932 (Rubenstein 1995, 63-67). But they made one major
mistake. In 1936 they predicted a fifth one--and got it spectacularly
wrong. Luck has a natural way of eventually running out.
PulsePoll still relies
on a self-selected sample rather than a randomly selected one. The only
defense for this is that internet users of this site were somehow typical of
the larger population of citizens, or more particularly, of citizens who vote
in presidential primaries. The problem with this is already known:
internet users were not a random sample of all citizens, all voters, or all
presidential primary voters. See "The Digital Divide" spring
2003 theme issue of IT&Society
(URL: www.stanford.edu/group/siqss/itandsociety/v01i04.html)
for indications that digital users were still quite different by factors such
as wealth and political activism from the non-digital population. There
is no doubt that digital users have been different, and often so in ways that
especially attract both politicians and advertisers to them. But even if
the self-chosen PulsePoll sample somehow captured all the attributes of its
parent population of digital users, those users still did not resemble the true
target population of presidential primary voters.
Another sophisticated
bad poll is run by former President Clinton's ex-advisor Dick Morris at
Vote.com (URL: www.vote.com).
Like PulsePoll, Vote.com is professionally presented in hopes of
producing enough audience to interest advertisers in subsidizing the
site. The issues are current and interesting. The site promises all
participants that their opinions and votes truly count, since those in power
will hear about the poll results. That might satisfy the millions whom
legitimate polls show are alienated from their own government. But just
like PulsePoll and its brethren, this site is irretrievably biased by its
failure to do random sampling. It does just the opposite, by inviting the
opinionated to separate themselves from the silent and make their voices heard
by those in power.
Internet polling is
nonetheless here to stay. By 2003 it had taken a quantum jump in
publicity and material impact. Even groups that know better will use
it. The Berkeley, California organization known as MoveOn.org ran an
online vote among its membership on June 24-25, 2003 to determine which among
the Democratic presidential candidates its membership preferred (MoveOn.org PAC
at URL: www.moveonpac.org/moveonpac/).
The results was a strong plurality for outspoken anti-Iraq War candidate Howard
Dean, with 43.87% of 317,647 members who cast votes in this 48-hour period (Report on the
2003 MoveOn.org Political Action Primary). The second-place
result was nearly-unknown long-shot Dennis Kucinich, with 23.93% of the
vote. Near the bottom, the well-known candidates Joseph Lieberman and
Richard Gephardt got 1.92% and 2.44% respectively! What can be concluded
from this? Self-selection of a highly left-wing participant voter pool is
dramatically obvious. Stark distinction between this group and the actual
2004 Democratic presidential primary voters was forthcoming soon thereafter (Democratic
Party presidential primaries, 2004). But the appeal of doing
such polls is evident.
Incidentally,
MoveOn.org, a knowledgeable organization on survey methods, engaged the
professional services of a telephone polling organization to verify that its
317,647 votes were not biased through "stacking the ballot
box" by anyone voting more than once. To check this, a randomly
selected sample of 1011 people from those 317 thousand were directly surveyed
by telephone to ascertain that the sample results were remarkably close to
those of the parent population. That means if ballot stuffing were done
at all, its effect was minor or negligible since the sample of 1011 was
fundamentally similar in result to the population of 317,647 (Greenberg Quinlan
Rosner Research, Inc. - gqr
at former URL: www.moveon.org/moveonpac/gqr.pdf).
Nonetheless, this safeguard had no effect upon the original
self-selected nature of the voting population of 317,647 web-surfing MoveOn.org
participants compared to the target population of "all persons who will
vote in 2004 Democratic presidential primaries and caucuses." They
remained as distinctive and politically untypical a group as ever.
The conclusion is
inescapable: no one to date has discovered a method of making web-based polls
truly representative of a general parent population. Amateur or
sophisticated, these polls are not capable of accurately profiling a parent
population beyond themselves.
This is a special
category of bad poll, reserved for so-called pollsters who deliberately use
loaded or unfairly worded questions under disguise of doing an objective
survey. Some of these are done by amateurs, but the most notorious are
produced by political professionals. These include the infamous push
polls. I treat these first. There are also comparable polls
composed of subtle question biases that create a preconceived set of
responses. These fall into the category of hired gun polls.
I treat them second, but not least.
A push poll
is a series of calls, masquerading as a public-opinion poll, in which the
caller puts out negative information about a target candidate (Push poll - Wikipedia).
Sometimes called robo-calls, the auto-call from a supposed polling operation
spews out derogatory information about a specific target. They call very
large numbers of households to disseminate as much derogation as possible
(Blumenthal 2006b, A
Real Push Poll?", 8 September 2006). They appear before
presidential primary and general elections and in swing district congressional
or senatorial contests, always by hard-to-trace nominally independent
organizations not directly linked to the beneficiary candidate or party.7
They are quite common in recent elections. Obviously someone in campaigns
makes use of these shadow practitioners. The operative most closely
identified with their use is former Bush political strategist Karl Rove,
suspected as director of the infamous February 2000 South Carolina accusatory
telephone "polls" maligning Bush primary rival John McCain (Push
poll - SourceWatch; Green 2007, The Rove
Presidency; Moore and Slater 2006; NPR
Karl Rove, 'The Architect' interview with Slater, 2006; Green 2004, Karl Rove in a Corner;
Borger 2004, The
Brains; Davis 2004, The
anatomy of a smear campaign; Suskind 2003, Why
are These Men Laughing?; DuBose 2001, Bush's Hit Man;
Snow 2000, The
South Carolina Primary). That did not end the practice despite
the expose. The 2006 midterm saw a spate of these (Drew 2006, New
Telemarketing Ploy Steers Voters on Republican Path - New York Times,
12/6/06). On eve of the 3 January 2008 Iowa caucuses, Republican rivals
of Mike Huckabee received such calls (Martin 2007, Apparent
pro-Huckabee third-party group floods Iowa with negative calls - Jonathan
Martin's Blog - Politico.com, 12/3/07). One may expect another
round of these in fall 2008 before the 4 November election of a 44th president
and the 111th Congress.
These dirty campaign
practices masquerade as legitimate polls. They are not
inquiries into what respondents truly think. Traugott and Lavrakas (2000,
165) define them as "a method of pseudo polling in which political
propaganda is disseminated to naive respondents who have been tricked into
believing they have been sampled for a poll that is sincerely interested in
their opinions. Instead, the push poll's real purpose is to expose
respondents to information ... in order to influence how they will vote in the
election." Asher (2001, 19) concurs: "push polls are an
election campaign tactic disguised as legitimate polling." Their
contemporary expression through automated telephone calls led Mark Blumenthal
of Mystery Pollster to call them "roboscam," meaning an automated
voice asks respondents to indicate a candidate preference, followed by a
scathing denunciation of the intended target (Blumenthal 2006a, Mystery
Pollster - RoboScam: Not Your Father's Push Poll, 21 February
2006). After a couple of attack-statements, it's on to another number,
hitting as many as possible for sake of maximizing the damage to the intended
political target. That, of course, is not real polling at all, which
explains why Blumenthal shuns the very term "push poll" for these.
Legitimate polling
organizations universally condemn push polls. The National Council on
Public Polls has shunned them since they masquerade as legitimate queries yet
are intended to sway rather than discover the opinion of respondents (NCPP
1995, A Press Warning from
the National Council on Public Polls). So has the American
Association for Public Opinion Research, which recommends that the media never
publish them or portray them as polls (AAPOR 2007, AAPOR Statement
on Push Polls). Push polls are propaganda similar to negative
advertising. They are conducted by professional political campaign
organizations in a manner that detaches them from the intended beneficiary of
actions taken against a rival (see Saletan 2000, Push Me, Poll You in Slate
Magazine). Some political interest groups also use them, often in a
hot-language campaign to raise money and membership by using scare
tactics. No matter the source, they treat their subjects with contempt.
Hired gun polls
are real polls, with limited size samples and numerous questions.8
They have been defined as: "Polls commissioned and carried out to promote
a particular point of view. Hired gun polls are associated with reckless
disregard for objectivity. A synonym for the term hired gun poll is the
term advocacy poll—although the hired gun metaphor connotes a much sleazier and
less professional image. Selective reporting of poll results is one mark
of hired gun polls. Another is questions worded to reflect the positions
of sponsors. Both practices blatantly violate accepted ethical standards
in the polling field." (Young 1992, 85; The
Polling Company TM)
Hired gun polls are not
literally synonymous with advocacy polls, polls used by advocacy
groups to promote their viewpoints. Advocacy polls become very widespread
in American politics in the past two decades (Beck, Taylor, Stanger, and Rivlin
1997 at REP16
- Issue
Advocacy Advertising During the 1996 Campaign). Issue advocacy
is any communication intended to promote a particular policy or policy-based
viewpoint. Polls can be extremely helpful in doing this
persuasively. There is an important political market for legitimate
poll-based issue information. Advocacy groups often commission a poll to
be done and then selectively release that information which furthers their
cause. But usually they do not go further, into the realm of push
polling.
But there are apparently
some exceptions. In 2002 the professional golf tour witnessed a political
fight which ultimately yielded a hired gun poll that quite deliberately
violated all standards enunciated in The
Polling Company TM definition. Chairman and CEO Hootie Johnson
of the Augusta Golf Club chose an aggressive counter-campaign to Martha Burk of
the National Council of Women's Organizations, who sought to oblige the
Masters' Golf Tournament's host club to open its doors to women for the first
time. He hired The
Polling Company and WomanTrend, a Washington D.C. polling firm
chaired by a prominent Republican woman named Kellyanne Fitzpatrick Conway (the
polling company T inc. - Kellyanne Conway).
The result was
satisfying for CEO Johnson and unsatisfying for Burk. One conservative
advocacy group took the survey and ran with it (Center for Individual Freedom, Augusta
National Golf Club Private Membership Policies under title
"Shoot-Out Between Hootie and the Blowhard Continues"). Conway
herself accompanied Johnson at a November 13, 2002 press conference to announce
the poll result, which had an 800-person-based sampling error of 3.5%. As
portrayed in the official PGA website (Poll
shows support for Augusta's right to choose membership - PGATOUR.COM):
"When asked whether -- like single-sex colleges, the Junior League,
sororities, fraternities and other similar same-sex organizations --
"Augusta National Golf Club has the right to have members of one gender
only," 74 percent of respondents agreed. Asked whether Augusta
National was "correct in its decision not to give into Martha Burk's
demand," 72 percent of the respondents agreed.'" That would
appear to wrap the matter up.
But a look at the poll
questions is instructive. They are clearly aimed at a push throughout the
survey. We get this language in Question 21 (Augusta
National poll Part III - PGATOUR.COM; also CFIF, cfif_poll_data):
21. As you may or may not know,
Augusta National Golf Club is a private golf club in Augusta, Georgia that does
not receive any type of government funding. Each year, the Masters Tournament
is held at Augusta National Golf Club. Currently, only men are members.
Martha Burk, the President of the National
Council of Women's Organizations, wrote a letter to the Augusta National Golf Club,
saying that the Masters Golf Tournament should not be held at a club that does
not have women members. She demanded that the Golf Club review its policy and
change it immediately, in time for the tournament scheduled for April 2003.
Do you recall hearing a lot, some, only a
little, or nothing about this?
Some 51 percent of the sample heard nothing
about this. Normally that's a warning to pollsters not to proceed further
with questions except under very high cautions. But here, Question 22
proceeds immediately with this stem:
22. And, as you may or may not know,
the Chairman of Augusta National Golf Club, William Johnson, responded to
Martha Burk by saying that membership to the club is something that is
determined by members only, and they would not change their policies just
because of Burk’s demand.
And, do you support or oppose the decision
by Augusta National Golf Club to keep their membership policy as it is?
The result was net support by 62 percent,
opposition by 30 percent, and a volunteered "do not know" from the
remainder. Then Question 23:
23. Although currently, there are no women
members of the Augusta National Golf Club, the Golf Club does allow women to
play on their golf course, and visit the course for the Masters
Tournament. In other words, women are welcome to visit the Club and often
play golf there as guests.
Knowing this, would you say that you
support or oppose the Augusta National Golf Club’s decision to keep their
membership policy as it is?
That was a now-obvious push. This
time we get 60 net support for the status quo and 33 percent opposed.
Questions 24 and 25 then sally forth in this fashion:
Please tell me if you agree or disagree
with the following statements:
24. “Martha Burk had the right to send a
letter to Augusta National Golf Club about their membership policies, but if
she really wanted to make some progress on behalf of women, she would have
focused her time and resources on something else.” [and]
25. “Martha Burk did not really care if the
Augusta National Golf Club began allowing women members, she was more concerned
with attracting media attention for herself and her organization.”
The replies to this being satisfactory, the
key item 26 comes in:
26. “The Augusta National Golf Club was
correct in its decision not to give into Martha Burk’s demand. They
should review and change their policies on their own time, and in their own
way.”
That got 72 percent to agree to not bending
to this awful woman's unreasonable demands against a selfless and public-minded
private club that welcomes women golfers with open arms. A little later,
Question 29 kept up the drumbeat:
And please tell me if you agree or disagree
with the following statement:
29. “Just like single-sex colleges, the
Junior League, Boys and Girls Scouts, Texas Women’s Shooting Club, Sororities
and Fraternities, and women business organizations, Augusta National Golf Club
has the right to have members of one gender only.”
Lo, this produced a full 74 percent sample
agreement with some form of defense for the existence of single-gender
organizations in America. That was the highest proportion of any of these
leading items, and thus was the single one seized by Mr. Johnson for
highlighting in his press conference accompanied by this hired-gun poll's
principal.
But a rebuke to the
"Hootie Poll" soon come from within the golf community itself.
The November 14, 2002 issue of PGA Tour's Golf Web carried a piece entitled Is the Augusta National
poll misleading?. Its verdict: "The "Hootie
Poll" is a mishmash of loaded statements and biased, leading questions
that are unworthy of Johnson or Augusta. It is a poll that is slanted to
get the answers they wanted, and in that it succeeded."9
All such ugly
polls commit gross violations of ethical standards of behavior.
They masquerade as legitimate objective surveys, but then launch into
statements designed to prejudice respondents against a specific candidate or
policy. Alongside the Hootie Poll, the web has produced other direct
examples for perusal. The investigative left-wing magazine Mother
Jones in 1996 published Tobacco
Dole, by Sheila Kaplan. The target turned out to be former
Attorney General of the State of Texas, Dan Morales. He and others are
routinely brought forth as statewide office-holders, but suddenly on Question
24 onward, the true purpose of this query is revealed in a series of
relentlessly negative statements about Morales alone. The reason was that
Attorney General Morales at the time was point man for engaging the state in
legal action against tobacco firms, and this alleged poll was a response to
undermine that goal.
How does one detect
these false jewels? Not simply by looking at the sample's
selection. The Hootie Poll obtained a proper sample in the proper way,
thus avoiding the most common reason for a "bad poll" label.
They also did not launch an immediate attack on a target the way robo-calls
do. Instead, questions worded in a deliberate leading way are the
surest sign of these ugly polls. Watch for loaded or biased questions
somewhere in the question sequence. Of course, most of these polls are
done by telephone since that's still the prevalent means of doing legitimate
surveys; so in person one must wait out the innocuous queries before
discovering the push component. Once that does show up, ask yourself if
that question or statement would be permitted in court of law without an
objection from the subject's counsel (or the judge). If
"objection!" followed by "sustained!" come to mind, you're
probably looking at an ugly poll. These deserve no more of your time, and
should be publicly given the contempt they so richly deserve.
An on-line discussion of
this technique is the Leading
Questions sector of The Business Research Lab's site (URL: www.busreslab.com/tips/tip34.htm).
It cites a survey designed to move opinion toward a change in the location of a
charitable-walk event that had the professed objective of preventing teenage
suicides. The status quo was location A but the survey's sponsor
obviously wanted to switch to location B. So the question was worded this
way: "We are considering changing from location A to location B this
year. Would you be willing to walk starting from location B, if it meant
that hundreds more teenage suicides would be avoided?" Now that's an
authentic leading question!
There are ways to get
even with these moral offenders. Herbert Asher, author of the six-edition
polling text Polling and the Public: What Every Citizen Ought to Know,
recommends that citizens who are push-polled should alert their local media of
that fact (Asher 2005, 140). One might also consider self-policing by
political consultants via their organization, the American Association of
Political Consultants. However, a 1998 survey of political consultants
showed that few believe their organization's formal stance against push polls
is an effective deterrent (Thurber and Dulio 1999, at Reprinted
from the July 1999 Issue of Campaigns and Elections Magazine: A Portrait
of the Consulting Industry, p. 6). Subsequent pre-election
practice has verified that concern. So citizen and media pressure is the
only effective current avenue for curbing this practice--but that in turn
requires wide public recognition of the ugly poll for what it truly is. I
offer this paper in pursuit of that worthy end.
Remember also that
questions are half the story. The other half is the set of responses
available to the polled. Another "ugly" sign is that
respondents face choices designed to help ensure the pre-ordained response
sought by the alleged pollster. This is not done only by campaign
organizations seeking to impeach a rival. It is also done at web poll
sites, sometimes in a rankly biased but amateur manner. This is richly
displayed at Opinion Center
from Opinion Center.com. One has to sample their fare to see how biased
it truly is. Here is one example that shortly followed the 2003 death of
actress Katherine Hepburn: "Everyone talks about how Katherine
Hepburn was such a role model. She wore pants, had a long affair with a
married man, never had kids and never married. Is this a good role
model?" The respondent is left to choose only a "yes" or
"no" response to this rant.
Another entry from them
concerned the scandal revelations of the New York Times in 2003:
"Top management at The New York Times, including Howell Raines and
Gerald Boyd, resigned / were asked to leave / were fired. These two
individuals were known for their curmudgeon-style of management. Is there
actually a curmudgeon-style of management or is that really just management by
intimidation and a bad attitude toward employees?" The respondents
could choose among the following three responses:
1) Curmudgeon-style
management is a valid style.
2) Curmudgeon-style management is not a valid style.
3) Managers manage that way because they are insecure.
2) Curmudgeon-style management is not a valid style.
3) Managers manage that way because they are insecure.
As one can see, subtlety
is not a long suit at Opinion Center.com. They borrow from legitimacy of
real polls and profess this as their motto: "Surveys are intended to
elicit honest information for academic and consumer-oriented market research
& entertainment." Opinion Center falls alarmingly short of
that. But they do teach us how to recognize bias that is built straight
into the questions and available responses. The professional push polls
and hired gun polls are considerably more difficult to smell out--but with a
little practice and a skeptical eye, any layperson can get their drifts too.
Many issue advocacy
groups routinely engage in blatantly biased polling on their pet topics.
Some are organizations that address "hot button" issues such as
abortion or gun control in the U.S. A website poll from pro-gun Keep and
Bear Arms (Keep
and Bear Arms - Gun Owners Home Page - 2nd Amendment Supporters,
reviewed 10/14/03) had this survey question and result.
How do you feel about the blatant abuses being foisted upon lawful, peaceable gun owners by crooked politicians and the biased media? |
|||
Angry |
26.1% |
336 votes |
|
Frustrated |
3.0% |
39 votes |
|
Sad |
0.8% |
10 votes |
|
Afraid |
1.1% |
14 votes |
|
Ready for whatever comes our way |
3.8% |
49 votes |
|
Empowered that we will be victorious |
2.9% |
37 votes |
|
Amused -- they will never take our guns away |
1.4% |
18 votes |
|
All of the above |
60.9% |
782 votes |
|
Total Votes: 1285
|
|||
This is no attempt to
discover public opinion. It validates the sponsor's biases by using a
self-selected audience which is urged along in its slant by questions that
would never gain admittance to a courtroom trial transcript.
One effect of these
slants is to invite skepticism about anyone who addresses hot button political
topics. Students often mistakenly identify polls on controversial
subjects to be ugly polls. This is patently incorrect. It is
perfectly legitimate for good polls to address the most touchy or delicate
subjects. In fact, those are often the things most worthwhile to know and
understand. Content addressing an explosive topic is not itself grounds
for sensing "ugly" in a poll. I recommend studying the
legitimate polls to see how two or three of them address such hot-button topics
as abortion or gun control.10
Once you see the nature of the wording, compare it to someone who is genuinely
trying to sway you instead of learn what your opinions are. With some
practice and alertness, you won't find it difficult to tell the difference of
good from ugly.
Surveying of public
opinion has become an important part of public life in democracies. With
just a little knowledge and practice, any student can master the distinctions
of good and bad, or bad and ugly public polls. These polls are so pervasive
in modern life that the need to accomplish this is self-evident. Getting
fleeced is not a good thing! No citizen should wander into the public
informational arena lacking the equipment for protection against false and
misleading sales pitches. In that spirit, I offer this piece as a shield
against the bad and ugly of the survey world at large.
Russell D. Renka
°Polling Links:
° Blogs and Commentary on Polls
° Data Sources
° Election Polls
° Embarrassments in polling history
° General Sources for Polls and Surveys
° How to interpret and judge polls
° New York Times Polling Standards
° Numeracy
° Numbskull abuses with numbers
° Push Polls
° Skepticism
° Specific polls (all "good" ones, of course)
° Statistical basis of polling
° Ugly Poll List
° Blogs and Commentary on Polls
° Data Sources
° Election Polls
° Embarrassments in polling history
° General Sources for Polls and Surveys
° How to interpret and judge polls
° New York Times Polling Standards
° Numeracy
° Numbskull abuses with numbers
° Push Polls
° Skepticism
° Specific polls (all "good" ones, of course)
° Statistical basis of polling
° Ugly Poll List
Blogs
and Commentary on polls:
° Mystery Pollster and Mystery Pollster - Pollsters by Mark Blumenthal is excellent for "Demystifying the Science and Art of Political Polling."
° Mystery Pollster and Mystery Pollster - Pollsters by Mark Blumenthal is excellent for "Demystifying the Science and Art of Political Polling."
Data Sources:
° NORC--The General Social Survey at the University of Chicago; very widely used data source, abundant documentation
° Center for Political Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor - gateway to several major sources
° Public Opinion Quarterly - journal devoted to methodology and results of public opinion surveys
° CESSDA HomePage from Council of European Social Science Data Archives
° National Network of State Polls - "the largest available collection of state-level data," from the data archive of the Odum Institute for Research in Social Science
° RealClear Politics - Polls from John McIntyre and Tom Bevan
° NORC--The General Social Survey at the University of Chicago; very widely used data source, abundant documentation
° Center for Political Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor - gateway to several major sources
° Public Opinion Quarterly - journal devoted to methodology and results of public opinion surveys
° CESSDA HomePage from Council of European Social Science Data Archives
° National Network of State Polls - "the largest available collection of state-level data," from the data archive of the Odum Institute for Research in Social Science
° RealClear Politics - Polls from John McIntyre and Tom Bevan
Election
Polls:
° The Cook Political Report's National Poll - biweekly election-year polling, from Associated Press and Ipsos Public Affairs (also see Ipsos News Center - Polls, Public Opinion, Research & News)
° American Research Group Inc. is a clearinghouse site
° PollingReport.com - Public Opinion Online - "An independent, nonpartisan resource on trends in American public opinion "
° NAES 2004 Home Page (National Annenberg Election Survey ) from The Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania
° Presidential Trial Heats: A Daily Time Series and Documentation for time series extraction from James Stimson, University of North Carolina
° The Cook Political Report's National Poll - biweekly election-year polling, from Associated Press and Ipsos Public Affairs (also see Ipsos News Center - Polls, Public Opinion, Research & News)
° American Research Group Inc. is a clearinghouse site
° PollingReport.com - Public Opinion Online - "An independent, nonpartisan resource on trends in American public opinion "
° NAES 2004 Home Page (National Annenberg Election Survey ) from The Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania
° Presidential Trial Heats: A Daily Time Series and Documentation for time series extraction from James Stimson, University of North Carolina
Embarrassments
in polling history - Literary Digest of 1936 and other royal screw-ups:
° The Seattle Times Political Classroom Political Primer Polls
° Oops!! (Yes, it's the Digest again. But there are others as well.)
° The Seattle Times Political Classroom Political Primer Polls
° Oops!! (Yes, it's the Digest again. But there are others as well.)
General
Sources for Polls and Surveys:
° Copernicus Election Watch: Public Opinion Polls
° National Council on Public Polls
° The archive of polls surveys -- The Roper Center for Public Opinion Research
° Public Opinion from University of Michigan Documents Center
° Ruy Teixeira - Center for American Progress has weekly polling columns; parent site is Home - Center for American Progress with Ruy's columns shown under heading of "Public Opinion Watch"
° SSLIS Public Opinion Guide from Yale University Social Science Libraries and Information Services (SSLIS)
° PRI - Links to Public Opinion Research
° Public Opinion Polling in Canada (BP-371E)
° Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life - American Religious Landscapes and Political Attitudes (in 2004)
° Copernicus Election Watch: Public Opinion Polls
° National Council on Public Polls
° The archive of polls surveys -- The Roper Center for Public Opinion Research
° Public Opinion from University of Michigan Documents Center
° Ruy Teixeira - Center for American Progress has weekly polling columns; parent site is Home - Center for American Progress with Ruy's columns shown under heading of "Public Opinion Watch"
° SSLIS Public Opinion Guide from Yale University Social Science Libraries and Information Services (SSLIS)
° PRI - Links to Public Opinion Research
° Public Opinion Polling in Canada (BP-371E)
° Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life - American Religious Landscapes and Political Attitudes (in 2004)
How
to interpret and judge polls:
° The Ten Commandments of Polling by Ken Blake, UNC-Chapel Hill
° 20 Questions A Journalist Should Ask from National Council on Public Polls (NCPP)
° A Press Warning on Push Polls from National Council on Public Polls
° Statement About Internet Polls from National Council on Public Polls - "there is a consensus that many web-based surveys are completely unreliable. Indeed, to describe them as "polls" is to misuse that term."
° NCPP Principles of Disclosure - a statement on ethics of proper polling
° Howard W. Odum Institute Poll Item Database Query Page has properly worded questions
° Answers to Questions We Often Hear from the Public from National Council on Public Polls
° If You're Going to Poll by The Why Files; see its Polling Glossary (for layman's explanation of standard terminology in polls), Serious Statistical Secrets page (good explanation of the basics), Obey the Law (law of large numbers, that is), Doing it wrong... (on subtle failures associated with not taking a truly random sample), Oops!! (screwing up royally), A Little Knowledge ... on deliberative polling per James Fishkin of U of Texas (my alma mater) and his Goes a Long Way and Why Change (of opinions) on the National Issues Convention in Austin, TX.
° ABCNEWS.com ABCNEWS Polling Guide from Gary Langer, head of the ABC News Polling Unit
° The Ten Commandments of Polling by Ken Blake, UNC-Chapel Hill
° 20 Questions A Journalist Should Ask from National Council on Public Polls (NCPP)
° A Press Warning on Push Polls from National Council on Public Polls
° Statement About Internet Polls from National Council on Public Polls - "there is a consensus that many web-based surveys are completely unreliable. Indeed, to describe them as "polls" is to misuse that term."
° NCPP Principles of Disclosure - a statement on ethics of proper polling
° Howard W. Odum Institute Poll Item Database Query Page has properly worded questions
° Answers to Questions We Often Hear from the Public from National Council on Public Polls
° If You're Going to Poll by The Why Files; see its Polling Glossary (for layman's explanation of standard terminology in polls), Serious Statistical Secrets page (good explanation of the basics), Obey the Law (law of large numbers, that is), Doing it wrong... (on subtle failures associated with not taking a truly random sample), Oops!! (screwing up royally), A Little Knowledge ... on deliberative polling per James Fishkin of U of Texas (my alma mater) and his Goes a Long Way and Why Change (of opinions) on the National Issues Convention in Austin, TX.
° ABCNEWS.com ABCNEWS Polling Guide from Gary Langer, head of the ABC News Polling Unit
Numeracy -
Competent interpretation of statistics and data-based information is essential
for sifting out the good from the bad and the ugly. Besides that, these
sites contain rich collections of abuse and plain old bunkum that will delight
and repel us in comparable proportions. Here are some sites that promote
literacy in handling numerical, statistical, and mathematical information:
° innumeracy.com - the home site; below are subcategories with extensive links to illustrative sources
° numeracy
° numeracy - Archives
° critical thinking
° Knowlogy
° innumeracy.com - the home site; below are subcategories with extensive links to illustrative sources
° numeracy
° numeracy - Archives
° critical thinking
° Knowlogy
Numbskull
abuses with numbers - Here's a rich category, probably
unlimited in potential number of examples.
° Best, Joel. 2001. Telling the Truth About Damned Lies and Statistics, The Chronicle Review, May 4.
° Best, Joel. 2001. Telling the Truth About Damned Lies and Statistics, The Chronicle Review, May 4.
Push Polls:
° 2003_pushpollstatement from AAPOR - American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR)
° NCPP - National Council on Public Polls - Press WARNING on push polls as political telemarketing
° Campaigns & Elections: What Are Push Polls, Anyway? by Karl G. Feld, May 2000. Campaigns & Elections 21:62-63, 70
° Push Polls - a biographical source compilation
° CBS News: The Truth About Push Polls February 14, 2000 180605 by Kathleen Frankovic
° pushpolls (The Case Against Negative Push Polls), from Michael Sternberg; a compilation of cases, including the one immediately below
° Public Opinion Strategies Push Poll from Mother Jones; a reproduced full poll that looks legitimate but is actually designed to condemn a specific candidate; the serious abuse starts with Question no. 24.
° Push Me, Poll You By William Saletan in Slate (February 15, 2000) on South Carolina push polling by the Bush campaign against presidential primary rival John McCain in February 2000
° 2003_pushpollstatement from AAPOR - American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR)
° NCPP - National Council on Public Polls - Press WARNING on push polls as political telemarketing
° Campaigns & Elections: What Are Push Polls, Anyway? by Karl G. Feld, May 2000. Campaigns & Elections 21:62-63, 70
° Push Polls - a biographical source compilation
° CBS News: The Truth About Push Polls February 14, 2000 180605 by Kathleen Frankovic
° pushpolls (The Case Against Negative Push Polls), from Michael Sternberg; a compilation of cases, including the one immediately below
° Public Opinion Strategies Push Poll from Mother Jones; a reproduced full poll that looks legitimate but is actually designed to condemn a specific candidate; the serious abuse starts with Question no. 24.
° Push Me, Poll You By William Saletan in Slate (February 15, 2000) on South Carolina push polling by the Bush campaign against presidential primary rival John McCain in February 2000
Skepticism -
This combination of attitude and education is a mighty valuable approach for
any who want to avoid fraud.
° The Skeptic's Refuge, including link to The Skeptic's Dictionary: A Guide for the New Millennium
Specific polls (all "good" ones, of course):
° American attitudes Program on International Policy Attitudes from Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) ; intro at [PIPA] About Us says "This website will report on US public opinion on a broad range of international policy issues, integrating all publicly available polling data."
° Current Population Survey Main Page and CPS Overview - From the U.S. Bureau of the Census, the CPS has special benefit of exceptionally large samples that can be subdivided almost endlessly.
° Eurobarometer - Monitoring the Public Opinion in the European Union
° European Public Opinion - Homepage
° The Gallup Organization - Gallup has gone commercial, limiting web access to subscribers only. But a few recent summations are present at any given time.
° Welcome to the Harris Poll Online and Harris Interactive - online polling
° Knowledge Networks® - The consumer information company for the 21st century - online polling
° The NES Guide to Public Opinion and Electoral Behavior - American National Election Studies has queries in 9 categories from 1948 through 2002.
° The New York Times/CBS News Poll - a useful archive
° On Politics - Washington Post Archive
° The Pew Research Center for The People & The Press
° PollingReport.com - Public Opinion Online - This is a compilation site organized by subject.
° Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA)
° Public Agenda Online - Public Opinion and Public Policy
° SurveyUSA® Methodology - They do simultaneous 50-state surveys for presidential election forecasting, comparison of state and regional presidential approval, and other cross-unit comparative purposes.
° Zogby International
° The Skeptic's Refuge, including link to The Skeptic's Dictionary: A Guide for the New Millennium
Specific polls (all "good" ones, of course):
° American attitudes Program on International Policy Attitudes from Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) ; intro at [PIPA] About Us says "This website will report on US public opinion on a broad range of international policy issues, integrating all publicly available polling data."
° Current Population Survey Main Page and CPS Overview - From the U.S. Bureau of the Census, the CPS has special benefit of exceptionally large samples that can be subdivided almost endlessly.
° Eurobarometer - Monitoring the Public Opinion in the European Union
° European Public Opinion - Homepage
° The Gallup Organization - Gallup has gone commercial, limiting web access to subscribers only. But a few recent summations are present at any given time.
° Welcome to the Harris Poll Online and Harris Interactive - online polling
° Knowledge Networks® - The consumer information company for the 21st century - online polling
° The NES Guide to Public Opinion and Electoral Behavior - American National Election Studies has queries in 9 categories from 1948 through 2002.
° The New York Times/CBS News Poll - a useful archive
° On Politics - Washington Post Archive
° The Pew Research Center for The People & The Press
° PollingReport.com - Public Opinion Online - This is a compilation site organized by subject.
° Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA)
° Public Agenda Online - Public Opinion and Public Policy
° SurveyUSA® Methodology - They do simultaneous 50-state surveys for presidential election forecasting, comparison of state and regional presidential approval, and other cross-unit comparative purposes.
° Zogby International
Statistical
basis of polling:
° Statistics Every Writer Should Know from RobertNiles.com
° Statistics Every Writer Should Know - Margin of Error
° Statistics Every Writer Should Know - Standard Deviation
° Statistics Every Writer Should Know - Mean
° Statistics Every Writer Should Know - Median
° Sample Sizes
° Calculate a Sample
° The Stats Board
° Statistical Assessment Service
° Statistics Every Writer Should Know from RobertNiles.com
° Statistics Every Writer Should Know - Margin of Error
° Statistics Every Writer Should Know - Standard Deviation
° Statistics Every Writer Should Know - Mean
° Statistics Every Writer Should Know - Median
° Sample Sizes
° Calculate a Sample
° The Stats Board
° Statistical Assessment Service
Ugly Poll List
(I am always looking for these characters.)
° Opinion Center is from Opinion Center.com; these characters take the cake for slanted and biased questions.
° Opinion Center is from Opinion Center.com; these characters take the cake for slanted and biased questions.
1 This practice is noticeably violated in
recent years by Investor's Business Daily and their polling agency,
Technometrica Institute of Policy and Politics (IBD/TIPP). TIPP does polls available
only to IBD, which
produces deeply biased reports based on TIPP surveys with no direct or full
link to that surveyor's questions or methods of acquiring its samples.
Their practices and results are of doubtful value, to say the least. Nate
Silver reviews a notorious recent IBD/TIPP
polls of doctors thusly: "that special pollster which is
both biased and inept.." (Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight: Politics
Done Right at ibdtipp-doctors-poll-is-not-trustworthy,
9/16/2009).
2 The HIP-Sampling Error
site defines Sampling Error as "That part of the total estimation error of
a parameter caused by the random nature of the sample" where a Random
Sample is "A sample that is arrived at by selecting sample units such that
each possible unit has a fixed and determinate probability of
selection." In layman's terms, this means every sample unit has the
same likelihood of being included in the sample, yet there's still error when
making an inference about the population. A self-selected sample that is not
randomly selected from a population has no specification of sampling error--as
the term is meaningless in that context.
A more technical online introduction with a bit of math from National Science Foundation is SESTAT's Understanding Sampling Errors and What is the Margin of Error.
Good polls use computer-generated random numbering. There's evidence that human beings cannot create truly random numbers very well. See Nate Silver, FiveThirtyEight Politics Done Right: Strategic Vision Polls Exhibit Unusual Patterns, Possibly Indicating Fraud, 9/25/2009 where an Atlanta polling firm called Strategic Vision, LLC is suspected of claiming poll results without doing the polls. The results distribute in a markedly nonrandom way.
A more technical online introduction with a bit of math from National Science Foundation is SESTAT's Understanding Sampling Errors and What is the Margin of Error.
Good polls use computer-generated random numbering. There's evidence that human beings cannot create truly random numbers very well. See Nate Silver, FiveThirtyEight Politics Done Right: Strategic Vision Polls Exhibit Unusual Patterns, Possibly Indicating Fraud, 9/25/2009 where an Atlanta polling firm called Strategic Vision, LLC is suspected of claiming poll results without doing the polls. The results distribute in a markedly nonrandom way.
3 The 1995 NPTS Courseware Interpreting
Estimates - Sampling Error site shows that sampling error follows
naturally from drawing out a part of a population for creation of a
sample. In the DSS Calculator,
entry of population size of 1000 AND also a sample size of 1000 produces a 0%
sampling error, because the entire population went into that sample, so any
second sample of 1000 cannot possibly vary from the first one. That's
true for all finite population and sample sizes, such as the 2004 presidential
election voter turnout of about 122,000,000. But if you enter population
of 122,000,000 and sample size of 1220, then you get a manageably small
sampling error of about 3%, even though this sample consists of only 1 in every
100,000 voters-to-be from the population.
4 Traditional response rates in
randomly selected telephone exchange samples are declining, and those not
called differ substantially from those called. Cell-only households are
younger, more affluent, more politically liberal, and less likely to be married
or to own their home; so polling cannot be indifferent to their absence from
landline samplings. However, a May 2006 report cited "a minimal
impact on the results" of surveys where cell-only users are excluded (Pew
Charitable Trusts, The
Cell Phone Challenge to Polling, 17 May 2006); and for now, RDD
usage is still widely employed.
The response rate problem along with rapidly spreading standard web access in U.S. households has prompted the Stanford-based Polimetrix firm to abandon the telephone outright in favor of an internet-based Matrix database (Polimetrix, Scientific Sampling for Online Research). They claim successes compared to traditional firms in California-based 2004 statewide referenda forecasts; and they may well be the portent of future polling methods from large on-line databases (Hill, Lo, Vavreck, and Zaller 2007).
However, their standard internet polling site (PollingPoint - A Nationwide Network of Millions of People Inspiring Public Debate) invites the usual website visitors' indulgence in online polling, with results showing almost nothing about resultant sample size, sampling error, or comparability to other polls. This is still self-selected sampling rather than random selection. I believe the jury is out; there is yet no consumer-linked warrant to inspire confidence in the results obtained by this method.
The response rate problem along with rapidly spreading standard web access in U.S. households has prompted the Stanford-based Polimetrix firm to abandon the telephone outright in favor of an internet-based Matrix database (Polimetrix, Scientific Sampling for Online Research). They claim successes compared to traditional firms in California-based 2004 statewide referenda forecasts; and they may well be the portent of future polling methods from large on-line databases (Hill, Lo, Vavreck, and Zaller 2007).
However, their standard internet polling site (PollingPoint - A Nationwide Network of Millions of People Inspiring Public Debate) invites the usual website visitors' indulgence in online polling, with results showing almost nothing about resultant sample size, sampling error, or comparability to other polls. This is still self-selected sampling rather than random selection. I believe the jury is out; there is yet no consumer-linked warrant to inspire confidence in the results obtained by this method.
5 Their warnings include this:
"The SERVE system might appear to work flawlessly in 2004, with no
successful attacks detected. It is as unfortunate as it is inevitable that a
seemingly successful voting experiment in a U.S. presidential election
involving seven states would be viewed by most people as strong evidence that
SERVE is a reliable, robust, and secure voting system. Such an outcome would
encourage expansion of the program by FVAP in future elections, or the
marketing of the same voting system by vendors to jurisdictions all over the
United States, and other countries as well. However, the fact that no
successful attack is detected does not mean that none occurred. Many attacks,
especially if cleverly hidden, would be extremely difficult to detect, even in
cases when they change the outcome of a major election. Furthermore, the lack
of a successful attack in 2004 does not mean that successful attacks would be
less likely to happen in the future; quite the contrary, future attacks would
be more likely, both because there is more time to prepare the attack, and
because expanded use of SERVE or similar systems would make the prize more
valuable. In other words, a "successful" trial of SERVE in 2004 is
the top of a slippery slope toward even more vulnerable systems in the
future." Jefferson et al., 2004, A Security Analysis of
the Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment (SERVE).
6 That would be Diebold Elections
Systems. Parent website is Welcome
To Diebold Election Systems. See Diebold
Investor Relations News Release of January 29, 2004 - "Maryland
Security Study Validates Diebold Election Systems Equipment for March
Primary" at URL: www.corporate-ir.net/ireye/ir_site.zhtml?ticker=DBD&script=410&layout=-6&item_id=489744.
See also the New York Times Opinion piece on this bizarre claim: How
to Hack an Election - New York Times, 31 January 2004; and Trusted
Agent_Report_AccuVote, 20 January 2004, a report to the state
legislature on Diebold's Maryland experience.
7 There is one prominent exception to
concealment. FreeEats and its director Gabriel Joseph III were
effectively outed after the 2006 midterm election as authors of robo-call
attacks against targets of conservative candidates and causes (Schulman 2006,
2007). Those who hired FreeEats remained unknown, but this shadowy
organization has assumed a certain notoriety. That may only be good advertising
for someone offering this product. Joseph made himself well known in
Indiana by counter-suing that State's attorney general (Schulman 2006).
8 The hired gun poll is succinctly
described by Humphrey Taylor, chairman of the Harris Poll in the U.S.,
with journalist Sally Dawson. See Public
Affairs News - Industry - Polling: Poll
Position (June 2006) and scroll down to "hired gun"
polling. Taylor says "there is a long history of hired-gun polls
which are actually designed to mislead people using every methodology. The
prime offenders have included PR firms, and sometimes non-profit groups, who really
more or less will come to you and say: ‘I need a survey which shows that 80 per
cent of people support our position – pro- or anti-abortion, or pro- or
anti-globalisation, or whatever it is’, or ‘80 per cent of people like my
client’s product more than they liked the other product.’”
That's right. Here's an example from a religious right wing group on the topic of abortion: Faith 2 Action Abortion Poll, with Wirthlin Worldwide National Quorum serving as the hired gun. (Thanks to my student Laura Muir for providing this example. RDR, 10/4/07)
That's right. Here's an example from a religious right wing group on the topic of abortion: Faith 2 Action Abortion Poll, with Wirthlin Worldwide National Quorum serving as the hired gun. (Thanks to my student Laura Muir for providing this example. RDR, 10/4/07)
9 This is not the only occasion for Conway's
firm to conduct polls with deliberate intent to produce an ideologically
conservative policy boost. After the 2008 presidential election, The
Federalist Society employed the firm to such effect, per Key
Findings from a National Survey of 800 Actual Voters » Publications » The
Federalist Society (November 7, 2008). The full poll is
labeled 2008
Post-Election Survey of 800 Actual Voters with Questions 7 through
11 on judicial philosophy (locale: pp. 5-6 of this 73-page Acrobat
file). The wording is designed to ensure a high proportion of respondents
will select the literalist approach strongly sought by the Society; and that
mission was accomplished.
10 For the abortion issue, PollingReport.com
has an Abortion and
Birth Control site with years of legitimate polls showing typically
worded legitimate questions on this topic.
American Association for Public Opinion
Research. 2007. Push Polls: Not to be confused with
legitimate polling (filename: AAPOR Statement
on Push Polls). URL: www.aapor.org/aaporstatementonpushpolls.
Asher, Herbert. 2001. Polling
and the Public: What Every Citizen Should Know, 5th ed.
Washington, D.C.: CQ Press.
Asher, Herbert. 2005. Polling
and the Public: What Every Citizen Should Know, 6th ed.
Washington, D.C.: CQ Press.
Beck, Deborah, Paul Taylor, Jeffrey
Stanger, and Douglas Rivlin. 1997. Issue
Advocacy Advertising During the 1996 Campaign. URL: www.annenbergpublicpolicycenter.org/03_political_communication/issueads/REP16.PDF.
Blake, Ken. 1996. The Ten
Commandments of Polling. URL: facstaff.uww.edu/mohanp/methodspolls.html.
Blumenthal, Mark. 2006a. Mystery
Pollster - RoboScam: Not Your Father's Push Poll, 21 February
2006. URL: www.mysterypollster.com/main/2006/02/roboscam_not_yo.html.
Blumenthal Mark. 2006b. A Real Push Poll?",
8 September 2006. URL: www.pollster.com/blogs/roboscam/.
Blumenthal, Mark. 2007a. Mystery
Pollster: Cell Phones and Political Surveys: Part I, 3 July
2007. URL: www.pollster.com/blogs/cell_phones_and_political_surv.php.
Blumenthal, Mark. 2007b. Mystery
Pollster: Cell Phones and Political Surveys: Part II. 13
July 2007. URL: www.pollster.com/blogs/cell_phones_and_political_surv_1.php.
Borger, Julian. 2004. The
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-------------------
The Polling Crisis: How to Tell What People Really Think - Scientific ...
www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-polling-crisis-how-to-tell-what-people-really-think/
Oct 19, 2016 ... In 2013, the Liberal Party of Canada
confounded expectations when it won ... The ingredients of an accurate poll are
fairly simple, but they can be hard to ... In the 2014 mid-term US election,
most pollsters failed in their ... Advanced technology may allow pollsters to
get a better read on voters' true feelings.
-----------------------------
Education
The 10 best classroom tools for gathering feedback
Getting feedback from your students can serve multiple purposes: it can help you understand your students’ comprehension of the material, it can give you insight into what teaching methods work or don’t work, and it can help engage students in their learning process by knowing they have a voice that is heard. Not only can feedback offer insight for both teachers and students, it can be an integral part of group work and classroom time, given the plethora of connected devices in the hands of our students these days.That said, there are a lot of classroom tools available for gathering feedback. You can poll students or have them create a survey for a project, use clickers and other classroom response type tools in real time, get feedback on teaching methods, and more. But which tools are best? We’ve collected a few of our favorites and listed them below, along with some of the activities they’re best for.
The best classroom tools for gathering feedback
Socrative
Socrative is one of the most well known (and widely used) student response systems, and for good reason. It is a really robust tool, and free to boot. Users can create questions in various formats (like a quiz, a simple quick question, a space race game, or an exit ticket). You’ll get answers in real time, and the interface is easy to use for both teachers and students.Verso
Verso is an app designed for flipped classrooms that allows teachers to distribute flipped classroom lessons and then gather feedback on those lessons from the students. Verso is free, and integrates easily with Google Drive for easy information uploads/downloads. Teachers can add prompts for each question, require multiple answers, etc, making it a fairly robust system, especially given the price – $0!Plickers
Plickers is a great option if you don’t have a classroom full of devices. Nik Chatzopoulos gives a great description of how Plickers can work in a one iPad classroom in one of his previous posts along with a video tutorial here. Plickers uses cards with QR codes (which can be used for multiple classes, as long as they’re not happening at the same time) instead of individual devices.Doodle
Doodle is a simple online system that is designed to make finding a mutually convenient meeting time simpler, but it can also be put to use in classrooms. You could actually use it to schedule something – a field trip, for example – or you can use it as a polling tool by entering free text in the question boxes. Doodle is free to use, but to gain access to some of the premium features (ex: premium offers tracking of whose responses are missing, which could be useful for classrooms), you’ll dish out $39/year. They do advertise 50% off for “education pricing”, if you contact the company directly. One of the advantages to using Doodle is that you don’t have to sign up for an account to use it, nor do your poll-ees. It does require an email address (as an identifier), but your students won’t be signing up for any additional accounts if you choose to use this tool.Polldaddy
Polldaddy is a pretty robust web-based polling tool that gives you a lot of options for customization. The free option does limit how many folks you can send the polls to via email per month (1,000), includes polldaddy branding, and doesn’t offer you the custom URL for your polls that the paid options do (from $200/year). Of note, that email limit is just that – for email. If you give your students a direct link to the poll, you can poll as many times and as many students as you like. Given that, the free option should work just fine for most teachers and classrooms.Poll Everywhere
Poll Everywhere is an SMS/Text based polling service, which will work particularly well for you if you have a 1:1 classroom or just a classroom full of kids with phones. (Obvious disclaimer: please be sure texting is ok with parents, etc etc etc.) The service offers a K-12 version with highly discounted pricing and the integration of classroom utilities like attendance and advanced reporting as well as a higher education plan geared towards larger classes.Google Forms
Well, it wouldn’t be a 2014 discussion of edtech if we didn’t discuss a Google tool in this list, right? Especially for those who already use other Google tools in their classrooms, Google Forms (as a part of Drive) allows users to create polls (including many different types of questions), integrate pretty pre-formatted themes, and distribute the form via email or URL. As with the rest of Google tools, it is free and easy to use.Infuse Learning
Infuse Learning is a free student response system that works with any device. It allows teachers to create quizzes, questions, prompts, and more, and push them out to students in the classroom. The questions can be asked verbally in the classroom, or sent via the platform. Students can respond in a large number of formats such as short answer, fill in the blank, multiple choice, true/false, or even draw an answer.Kahoot
Kahoot is a web tool that delivers online quizzes and surveys to your students. Teachers can use a simple drag and drop method to create quizzes/polls/surveys, and push them out to student devices (alternatively, the teacher can ask the questions verbally or show them on the board and students can still respond using the platform). In this platform, teachers can encourage students to ask their own questions and have other students answer as well, making it one of the more interactive options listed here (many are just teacher-student). Kahoot is free, and works on any connected device.- 3 Simple and Powerful Feedback Tools in Google Docs
- The Power of Positive Feedback and Publishing
- 50 easy-to-use tools for creating classroom polls and quizzes
- The teacher’s guide to optimizing student feedback
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