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Beginning in 1935 the results of public opinion polling on a national scale began to become available in the United States. In the following years polling spread abroad. All sorts of purposes were in the minds of the pollsters, ranging from the forecasting of election returns to the survey of the predispositions to be taken into consideration in the management of public opinion for economic, political, or humanitarian ends. The cost was too great to employ the method on a scale sufficient for gathering data systematically for either scientific or historical purposes; hence the results in the first decade were extraordinarily spotty and uneven.
Whatever the imperfections of conception and technique, the results obtained by the brief polling interview are useful for the information that they supply of an original kind about contemporary history. It is quite impossible to turn through the present logbook of the results obtained by twenty-three organizations without having one's imagination stirred by the potentialities of this instrument of observation. If the polling organizations were better financed, they might coöperate with psychiatrists and social scientists in exploring the structure of collective attitudes on a scale that would contribute in the same operation to science, history, and policy. Polls are by no means directed exclusively to the 'preference' perspectives of their subjects. They question such other demands as whether the respondent is going to vote for one candidate or another. Besides these expressions of 'determination', there are questions about the boundaries of the self, such as whether one is affiliated with one group or another in society. We might speak of these as 'identifications', even at some risk of confusing the meaning of the mechanism of identification. Many questions are designed to elicit factual assumptions about present, past or future factual 'expectations'.
There is no entry in the index for 'psychiatry' or 'psychiatris