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Over the past fifty years, public opinion polls have assumed an increasingly important role in daily life. Quite possibly every person living in America has at one time or another been affected by polls. In fact, few aspects of our lives remain untouched by polls—from the television programs we watch, to the choice of candidates for public office, to national political issues, to the products we buy. Polling has become widely known through frequent use by television and the mass market print media.

As we approach the millennium, we find ourselves in a world that places ever greater weight and significance on the outcome of polls, surveys, and market research. The advent of modern polling began with the use of scientific sampling in the mid‐1930s and has progressed vastly beyond the initial techniques and purposes of the early practitioners such as George Gallup, Elmo Roper, and Archibald Crossley. In today's environment, the computer is an integral part of most commercial survey work, as are the efforts by academic and nonprofit enterprises. It should be noted that the distinction between the use of the words “poll” and “survey” is somewhat arbitrary, with the mass media seeming to prefer “polling,” and with academia selecting “survey research.” However, searching online systems will yield differing results, hence this author's inclusion of both terms in the title of this article.

Mathematical analysis with its formulas and models is being used in many of the social sciences, including political science; with the result that scholarly journal articles often require special knowledge to interpret their meaning. Although not all social scientists subscribe to these methods and frequently, letters to the editor decry the use of symbols instead of prose to explain human behavior, the search continues for precise mathematical models that provide a basis for interpreting and predicting political situations.

This paper aims to chart the influence of McCarthyism and of FBI surveillance practices on a number of prominent American social scientists, market researchers, opinion pollsters and survey research practitioners during the post-war years. Hitherto disparate sets of historical evidence on how Red Scare tactics influenced social researchers and marketing scientists are brought together and updated with evidence from original archival research.

The paper draws on the existing secondary literature on how social research practitioners and social scientists reacted to the unusually high pressures on academic freedom during the McCarthy era. It supplements this review with evidence obtained from archival research, including declassified FBI files. The focus of this paper is set on prominent individuals, mainly Bernard Berelson, Samuel Stouffer, Hadley Cantril, Robert S. Lynd, Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Herta Herzog, Ernest Dichter, but also the Frankfurt School in exile.

Although some of the historiography presents American social scientists and practitioners in the marketing research sector as victims of McCarthyism and FBI surveillance, it can also be shown that virtually all individuals in focus here also developed strategies of accommodation, compromise and even opportunism to benefit from the climate of suspicion brought about by the prevailing anti-Communism.

Anyone interested in questions about the morality of marketing, market research and opinion polling as part of the social sciences practiced in vivo will need to pay attention to the way these social-scientific practices became tarnished by the way prominent researchers accommodated and at times even abetted McCarthyism.

Against the view of social scientists as harassed academic minority, evidence is presented in this paper which shows American social scientists who researched market-related phenomena, like media, voters choices and consumer behaviour, in a different light. Most importantly, this paper for the first time presents archival evidence on the scale of Paul F. Lazarsfeld’s surveillance by the FBI.

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This study examines public budgeting experts' perception on the viability and adoptability of the proposed line-item veto. The study reveals that: (1) the line-item veto is not considered by the experts as the most favored budgetary reform idea from both measurements of viability and adoptability; (2) the experts believe that the line-item veto may not be adopted in the near future even though they agree it is a viable idea; and (3) there are no significant correlations between the experts' views and their personal characteristics.

Reports on a study designed to explore the effects of religion and religiosity on perceived risk in purchase decisions. Asserts that religious values represent the most basic element of a consumer′s cognitive world, and can be meaningfully related to lifestyles. Concludes that religious individuals tend to perceive higher risks in their purchase decisions.

The field of survey research, driven at a fast pace by exploding technology, promises an exciting future. This future, however, is threatened by a number of growing, unresolved problems. In order to get a perspective, Walker/Gallup recently interviewed a group of senior marketing information executives. The largest number of these were from manufacturing firms, followed by service organizations, and then advertising agencies. About four in ten said their responsibilities were primarily concerned with marketing intelligence, and a like proportion had the additional responsibility of strategic planning. About one‐tenth had other responsibilities, including sales, promotion, new product research, and the like. Four in ten said the number of professional employees assigned to the function they managed was under ten. At the other end, about one person in fourteen indicated over 100 employees.

In 1986 The Roper Center celebrated its fortieth year as the largest archive of survey data in the world. It was, in fact, 1946 when Elmo Roper founded the center at Williams College. A collection of 177 surveys conducted by Roper Research Associates served to establish the center as the first archive of polling data. From the start, the center laid the framework by which other pioneers in the field of opinion research, especially George Gallup, Sr., came to appreciate its scholarly nature. Subsequently many of these pioneers helped increase its holdings by donating survey material of their own.