Collaborative Research: The American Mass Public in the Early Cold War Years

近几十年来，对个人层面的舆论和行为的研究蓬勃发展。但是，由于缺乏高质量的个人层面的数据，我们对20世纪50年代之前的大众舆论动态的理解受到了破坏。当时的调查没有被社会科学界利用，因为它们不容易使用。数据经常包含大量的编码错误和其他错误。此外，这些调查采用了现在已不可信的配额抽样程序。在过去的七年里，主要调查人员在国家科学基金会的资助下，努力恢复了从1936年到1945年期间的400多项民意调查。事实证明，这些数据是一种极其宝贵的资源。这个新项目将向社会科学研究界提供过去在很大程度上被忽视的民意数据宝库。私人投资主任将以两种方式扩展他们以前的工作。首先，他们将为1945年末至1952年进行的大约350项民意调查汇编和制作易于使用的计算机文件。其次，他们将改进通过配额抽样收集的民意数据的适当分析方法。这些方法将被用来创建一套覆盖整个1936-1952年期间的一致的调查权重。恢复这些早期的民意数据有望阐明有关大众公众在政治系统中的作用的关键问题。这次的民意调查包含了太多有价值的项目，衡量人们对经济政策、种族关系和美国对苏联和中国政策的态度。私人侦查员将使用民调数据来确定广大公众如何引导和反应民权问题上的调整。这些数据将有助于理解随着经济自由主义、民主党党派主义和种族自由主义在群众层面上逐渐联系在一起的变化的动态。PIS还将使用外交政策的意见数据作为资源，以检查公众对朝鲜战争和冷战早期其他重大事件的反应的性质。该项目将具有广泛的社会价值。它承诺通过促进历史舆论的研究来拓展政治行为的领域。它将向学者社区提供艾森豪威尔时代之前的丰富的个人层面的意见数据，使研究人员能够对一系列实质性的重要主题获得新的见解。

The study of individual-level public opinion and behavior has flourished in recent decades. But our understanding of the dynamics of mass opinion prior to the 1950s has been undermined by the absence of high-quality, individual-level data. The surveys from this time have not been exploited by the social science community because they are not easily usable. The data often contains numerous miscodings and other errors. In addition, the surveys employed now-discredited quota sampling procedures. Over the last seven years, the principal investigators have, with the assistance of a grant from the NSF, worked to resuscitate over 400 opinion polls from the 1936 to 1945 period. These data have proven to be an extremely valuable resource. This new project will make available to the social science research community a trove of public opinion data that has largely been ignored in the past. The PIs will extend their previous work in two ways. First, they will compile and produce readily usable computer files for roughly 350 public opinion polls undertaken from late 1945 through 1952. Second, they will improve upon methods appropriate for analyzing public opinion data collected through quota sampling. These methods will be applied to create a consistent set of survey weights that will cover the entire 1936-1952 period.Recovering this early opinion data promises to illuminate critical questions concerning the role of the mass public in the political system. The public opinion polls from this time contain a plethora of valuable items measuring attitudes concerning economic policy, racial relations, and U.S. policy towards the Soviet Union and China. The PIs will use the polling data to determine how the mass public guided and reacted to the realignment on civil rights issues. The data will help understand the dynamics of change as economic liberalism, Democratic partisanship, and racial liberalism gradually became connected at the mass level. The PIs will also use the opinion data on foreign policy as a resource for examining the nature of the public's reaction to the Korean War and the other major events of the early Cold War. The project will have broad social value. It promises to expand the field of political behavior by promoting the study of historical public opinion. It will provide to the community of scholars a wealth of individual-level opinion data in the pre-Eisenhower era, allowing researchers to gain new insights into an array of substantively important topics.