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The article presents abstracts of various papers related to polls and the new politics. One of the paper discussed is "The Political Functions of Public Opinion Polls in the United States," by Irving Crespi. The dilemma of democratic societies that so concerned Tocqueville, how to free men from entrenched authority without subjecting them to a more arbitrary public opinion, is particularly relevant to the analysis of tile role of public opinion polls in the United States today. Another paper discussed is "The Changing Role of the American Political Parties," by Harry S. Aslimore. The upcoming election may be the one that will finally demonstrate the significance of the shifts in United States population, and most importantly the changes in communications that have affected the political process in this country. Some other papers discussed are "Polling: The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy and the Bandwagon Effect," by John L. Perry, "New Techniques for Measuring, Analyzing and Reporting Social Change," by Samuell Lubell and "Application of Q to the Assessment of Public Opinion," by William Stephenson.

This article evaluates relationship between the U.S. press and U.S. elections. U.S. people often find the way U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt won elections with a majority of the press against him as something unprecedented. The author brings out the detail analysis of press right from its initial days to the present scenario. He reports that in the early days there was federalist domination in newspaper activity. The reasons for federalist dominance in the press are clear. The early papers were published chiefly in the seaports and commercial towns, and they generally stood for and expressed those patriotic aims characteristic of the politics to promote commerce with Great Britain and to establish a sound U.S. financial system. There were six Presidential elections during the period of federalist domination of the press, and in half of them the winner was elected without the help of a newspaper majority. In the next four Presidential campaigns, parties tended to divide on sectional lines rather than upon the old and familiar questions of policy, while new issues made other new groupings.

The article presents several abstracts of various studies related to black communities. The analysis is based on personal interviews dealing with the social problems perceived by black residents of Indianapolis, Indiana. In this survey, unexpected difficulties in retaining black interviewers necessitated using white interviewers to meet project deadlines. Anticipating that the data would reflect the operation of interviewer effect, subsequent analysis paid careful attention to the phenomenon. Ethical issues surrounding research with humans are of concern not only to researchers and professional associations but also to government agencies and the Congress. Another report describes the changing attitudes of executives toward the corporate advancement of women and nonwhites as well as their election to boards of directors, and examines the ways in which executives believe that women and minorities are now discriminated against in opportunities to grow into positions in top and middle management.

This section presents abstracts of several public opinion research published in the U.S. in the 1970s.

Although a widely held viewpoint is that "the majority of the people get their news from television," a national survey shows equal proportions of the population reading newspapers and watching television news on a typical weekday. The study examines the public's attitudes toward the press in general and toward the specific papers, most often read. It also reports on the most commonly read elements of newspaper content and notes the changing character of local news. This philosophy affronts newspaper editors accustomed to a more searching and comprehensive style of news gathering. It also indicates the need to look at the present state of newspapers, their readership, and the public's perception of them. This was the purpose of the study whose highlights are summarized in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on the psychology of newspapers along with an exhaustive study of the treatment, which Boston newspapers accorded to revision of the Neutrality Act that gripped the attention of the U.S. in the fall of 1939. This investigation is based upon a complete sample of weekday and Sunday editions of English-language newspapers published in Boston, Massachusetts. The extent to which this simplification of the story took place in the Boston papers was estimated as carefully as possible. The evidence indicates that editors and newswriters attempt to give as comprehensive and adequate a representation of events as they dare; while the readers insist upon selecting, sharpening, and pointing the issue still further to suit their desire for simplification and definiteness. Newspapers must dramatize and select in order to produce in their readers the emotional integration required for a good fight. A newspaper's pattern of influence is built around its editorial policy. Most papers do to a certain extent select news items favoring the editorial policy of the paper, and reject those that are opposed. In summary, the evidence reported in this study is interpreted as supporting five generalizations which are offered here as tentative laws in the new field of the psychology of newspapers: (1) issues are skeletonized; (2) any given newspaper's field of influence is well-patterned; (3) readers are more emotional than editors; (4)public interest as reflected in newspapers is variable in time; (5) public interest rapidly fatigues and presses for an early closure.

The outcome of the recent U.S. presidential election was widely construed as a repudiation of the American press, largely because of the frequently-published statement that Franklin Roosevelt won his stunning victory in the face of opposition from 80 per cent to 85 per cent of the nation's daily newspapers. Roosevelt's opposition Republican Alfred Landon was supported by 60% of the American press. No Southern daily of importance supported Landon so that the papers and the populace there were in substantial agreement. Except in New York City, where Roosevelt had a slight margin in newspaper backing, no large city outside the South had dailies predominantly supporting him. On the contrary, the preponderance was strongly in the other direction almost everywhere. It seems obvious, then, that Landon was, in general, the favorite of the press. Since he carried only two States, the implications as to newspaper influence can hardly be encouraging to journalistic practitioners.

Party elite cues are among the most well-established influences on citizens' political opinions. Yet, there is substantial variation in effect sizes across studies, constraining the generalizability and theoretical development of party elite cues research. Understanding the causes of variation in party elite cue effects is thus a priority for advancing the field. In this paper, I estimate the variation in party elite cue effects that is caused simply by heterogeneity in the policy issues being examined, through a reanalysis of data from existing research combined with an original survey experiment comprising 34 contemporary American policy issues. My estimate of the between-issue variation in effects is substantively large, plausibly equal to somewhere between one-third and two-thirds the size of the between- study variation observed in the existing literature. This result has important implications for our understanding of party elite influence on public opinion and for the methodological practices of party elite cues research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Opposition to LGBT rights remains a contemporary fixture within the United States in spite of increasingly liberalizing attitudes toward LGBT individuals. In this paper, I argue that a potentially overlooked factor driving this opposition is rural identity—or an individual's psychological attachment to a rural area. Using data from the 2020 ANES, I find that rural identity predicts less favorable estimations of LGBT individuals. Rural identifiers are also less likely to support pro-LGBT policy measures than nonrural identifiers. Nevertheless, I find the magnitude of the effects of rural identity on anti-LGBT views to be surprisingly small. It is also the case that, on average, rural identifiers exhibit net-positive estimations of LGBT individuals and are broadly supportive of LGBT rights, suggesting that elected officials enacting anti-LGBT legislation in rural areas of the United States are potentially out of step with the preferences of their electorate. These findings also have implications for what it means to hold a rural identity beyond a generalized animosity toward urban areas, and for understanding urban-rural divergences in US public opinion on issues such as LGBT rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we analyze trends in Americans' immigration attitudes and policy preferences nationally and across partisan and racial/ethnic groups. In the 1990s and early 2000s, Democrats and Republicans shared similarly negative attitudes toward immigrants and high levels of support for restrictionist immigration policies. Beginning in the 2010s and continuing through the early 2020s, however, Democrats' aggregate immigration opinions liberalized considerably. We observed increasingly liberal immigration preferences among Democrats of all racial and ethnic backgrounds after 2016, but this trend was especially pronounced among white Democrats. Among Republicans, opinion on immigration remained mostly stable over this period, although in some cases it became more conservative (e.g. border security) and more liberal on others (e.g. amnesty). The marked liberalization in immigration opinion among Democrats has left partisans more divided on immigration than at any point since national surveys began consistently measuring immigration opinion in the late twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Polarization and participation are often connected in the political science literature, though sometimes the causality runs participation to polarization and sometimes the causality runs in the reverse direction. In some accounts there is an expectation that increasing participation and increasing polarization generate an ongoing spiral effect. In this paper we evaluate the over-time relationships between polarization and participation by assessing evidence in existing panel and aggregate data. We find that people with more extreme attitudes are more likely to participate in politics. However, only one particular form of participation—persuading others—appears to predict later levels of polarization. Therefore, only persuasion has the necessary correlation and temporal ordering for a feedback loop with more extreme ideology. The implication is that the discipline should pay more attention to interpersonal persuasion as a form of participation in American politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What drives affective polarization in American politics? One common argument is that Democrats and Republicans are deeply polarized today because they are psychologically different--motivated by diametrically opposed and clashing worldviews. This paper argues that the same psychological motivation--authoritarianism--is positively related to partisan extremism among both Republicans and Democrats. Across four studies, this paper shows that authoritarianism is associated with strong partisanship and heightened affective polarization among both Republicans and Democrats. Thus, strong Republicans and Democrats are psychologically similar, at least with respect to authoritarianism. As authoritarianism provides an indicator of underlying needs to belong, these findings support a view of mass polarization as nonsubstantive and group-centric, not driven by competing ideological values or clashing psychological worldviews. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information about the fifty-third annual conference of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR). The conference took place on May at the Marriott Pavilion Downtown in Saint Louis, Missouri. Official registration was 566, including 77 new members. mere were 159 first timers of which 72 were students. A breakdown of the registration revealed 44 percent affiliated with academic institutions, 37 percent commercial, 10 percent government, 6 percent nonprofit, and 3 percent other. A total of 460 people were listed as participants in a variety of roles: session organizers, plenary speakers, short-course instructors, panelists, chairs, discussants, authors, and presenters of papers. In keeping with the tradition for conferences held during even-numbered years, the conference site was shared by the World Association for Public Opinion Research (WAPOR), whose conference ran May 13-15. Joint AAPOR/WAPOR paper sessions included the themes of public opinion in developing countries, comparisons across cultures, and surveys and the courts.

General political knowledge is a central variable in American politics research. Individuals with high political knowledge exhibit behaviors that are consequential to a well-functioning democracy, including holding more stable political opinions, exhibiting greater ideological constraint, knowing more about political candidates, and being more likely to vote correctly. In this paper, we examine whether the internet revolution, enabling citizens to look up anything at any time, has changed the relative importance of political knowledge in American politics. We show that important generational differences exist between Americans raised during the broadcast era and Americans raised with the presence and accessibility of the internet. Internet access can be a substitute for political knowledge stored in long-term memory, particularly among this younger generation, who may be relying on the internet to store knowledge for them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While most of the publishing world is bemoaning its state, the trade press continues to flourish. In this article the author describes the history, distinguishing characteristics, and current activities of this rapidly expanding and specialized medium. Most people are familiar with the consumer magazines which are designed to satisfy the entertainment and educational needs of the general public. According to the United States Department of Commerce, trade journals can be defined as magazines edited to serve distinct business or professional fields. Julien Elfenbein, an articulate spokesman for the trade press, describes a "businesspaper" as a specialized periodical of editorial opinion, technical know-how, and news information, independently owned and operated. The trade press seems to be flourishing at a time when mid-Manhattan, New York City, New York, editors are shaking their heads sadly at the condition of publishing. Despite a predicted demise of book and magazine publishers, J. K. Lasser, who served as chief diagnostician to the many species of publishers, predicted continuing prosperity for trade paper publishing.

Proselytism is the sine qua non of the Roman Catholic Church. Americans, wrote minister George Higgins in the June 1944 issue of the journal "Catholic Action," the official organ of the National Catholic Welfare Conference, "would be foolish indeed, however, to think that this nation, or any other nation, can continue to escape the horrors of internal class warfare unless the full body of Catholic social teaching is given practical, concrete application as quickly as possible." In spite of an attempt to Catholicize the United States as a patriotic duty, the Catholic Church, according to the 1946 "National Catholic Almanac," is not making "satisfactory progress in winning non-members to the true faith. Though in the year 1944 almost 85,000 converts were recorded, this number is an insignificant proportion of the 110 million outside the fold." Moreover, there is a considerable Catholic "leakage." Birth control, intermarriage, the disintegrating effects of urban life on the family, about eighty per cent of American Catholics live in cities, and higher education in public schools, have been important factors in desertions from the Catholic Church.

This article focuses on the analysis of editorials on national and international affairs published in ten newspapers in the state of Texas. The ten papers chosen appear to be the dominant metropolitan newspaper influences of Texas. The sample covers editorials published from early September through December 15, 1945, together with some fifty additional editorials published between December 11 and December 31, 1945. One paper, the Dallas Times Herald, showed greatest concern for national and international issues. The Times Herald's greatest interest was community affairs. While the Dallas Morning News and the Houston Post were primarily interested in national and international problems, they also allocated a high number of editorials to local activities. The San Antonio Light had no editorials on local or state matters, 1036 editorials covered the national scene. However, since many of these editorials discussed more than one subject, 1838 topic references were noted. Texas editorials carried 381 references to phases of organized labor and industrial strife. All except the Houston Post published a total of 60 editorials blaming labor, primarily, for the strike epidemic. The Post's editorials, while usually anti-labor, took no position in this regard. Ten papers published 103 editorials urging some form of legislation.

This article studies the image of the United States in the British Press. The author says that if the British press is accused of sensationalism or degeneration it is said to have been Americanized by a process of both good and bad general imitation. In a recent survey it was revealed that of some 520 representative and influential Britons, 410 relied upon the British press to keep them informed about the U.S. British school children's primary source was the cinema, which was apparently six times more effective than the next source, British newspapers. Student opinion was evenly divided on the statement, "British newspapers should print more news about the United States." America is more strongly represented in news-gathering agencies in Great Britain than Great Britain is in the United States. There are ten or more American papers and seven news services with offices in London, England. American crime receives more space than all the crime of all the rest of the world, and so does American sex-life.

Farmers compose one of the most important occupational groups in the U.S. Yet, in past campaigns the Farm Division at the Republican Party's headquarters has emphasized political organization in farm areas at the expense of machinery for preparing and distributing propaganda designed especially for rural voters. Going by the significance of rural voters, The Republican Party organization at Washington finally decided to set up a separate rural press section in the Publicity Division, for the 1940 presidential election in the U.S. Herman Roe, a former president of the National Editorial Association, has been appointed the head of the new section of rural press. Although he centered his hopes on publishers in the agricultural Middle West, Roe circularized a list of 6,000 papers. Of the 4,355 publishers who requested publicity releases in response to his letter, a surprisingly large number came from New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. A thorough knowledge of rural newspapers enabled Roe to adopt techniques that would best serve the country press.

Dual-frame telephone surveys that sample from both landline and cell-phone frames have become common because the US population is increasingly abandoning landline phones. Designing a dual-frame telephone survey requires a decision on the sample allocation, and ultimately the allocation of respondents, from each of the two frames. The allocation of the sample to the two frames influences the unequal weighting effect (UWE), and consequently, the precision of estimates calculated from the survey data. The sample allocation also influences cost, since obtaining cell-phone respondents is often more expensive than obtaining landline respondents. In this paper, we present results that designers of dual-frame studies can use to determine an allocation of responders that optimizes the precision of the survey estimates for a given cost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an attempt to discover the effect of newspapers' editorial policies on their coverage of political news, the contents of the Baltimore, Maryland press relating to the presidential campaign were analyzed for the week preceding election day. All four of the papers the morning and evening Sun papers, Hearst's News-Post, and the Negro Afro-American shared the sentiments of the press as a whole that Governor Thomas E. Dewey should and would be elected. But editors of the four, when interviewed, also maintained that newspapers should give equal space to both sides of public issues, when news values permit. The results are interesting in this light, because the two Sun papers actually gave U.S. President Harry S. Truman's campaign equal or greater space than that of the Republicans. From this fact two inferences are suggested, first, that these papers lived up to their standards of impartial political reporting, and, second, that from an objective point of view the Democrats must have provided more news material during the closing days of the campaign.

In this article the author presents various topics published in the Winter 1952-53 issue of the journal "Public Opinion Quarterly." In the first paper published in the issue, Paul F. Lazarsfeld expresses the hope of American sociologists that international communications research can help to fill certain methodological and substantive gaps which have not yet been successfully bridged in the domestic sphere. He stresses particularly the opportunities open in this new field for bringing social researchers and policy makers closer together in their endeavors in the area of social progress. The reader may look at this paper as an expression of mature speculation about the opportunities, hopes, and dangers in the new field. In the next two sections, the author moves into the work-a-day realm, encountering the people who, in spite of all the handicaps of an ill-defined field, unproven methods, and shortage of trained personnel, have gone ahead and contributed substantively to international communications research. In the section on "Techniques" some very pertinent problems of methodology are frankly stated. The issue is concluded by a short report on the first meeting of the Committee on International Communications Research, which took place during the last annual convention of the American Association for Public Opinion Research.

Industrial public relations departments have few reliable means for determining either the content of news stories on individual companies and industries or the total coverage given for such stories in the U.S. press. By classification of all relevant items appearing in a random sample of daily papers, authors determined the potential reader exposures of various types of industrial news coverage. An important function of research in public relations is the application of quantitative research methods to problems in industrial news analysis. The public relations worker generally has had to rely on relatively crude measures of the news coverage given to individual companies. The instrument still in wide use is an old rule-of-thumb handed down from the earliest days of calculated publicity efforts in this country. The Research Department of the Boston University School of Public Relations and Communications has in a recent study devised a method for measuring the potential reader exposure of news stories about individual companies and industries.

This article focuses on the British Press Inquiry. The importance of the media of mass communication for the successful functioning of democratic government has perhaps been more discussed in the U.S. than in Great Britain. The fact is that newspapers are bigger business in England than in any other country. The inter-relationship of the basic elements, circulation, advertising and revenue, is not essentially different from that in the press of the U.S., but certain conditions not existing in equal degree elsewhere have facilitated a concentration and grouping of ownership quite without precedent. The press of a nation of newspaper readers is evidently in for a thorough going-over. Between parliamentary sessions the Cabinet decided to leave the motion for an inquiry to open vote of the House of Commons. This, under the circumstances, assured an investigation, though it kept the Government skirts free in theory of the charge of interference with the press.

The aim of this study is to determine the criteria according to which world news presented in the Soviet Union-controlled press of Berlin, Germany is selected. Berlin of today, with its four sectors under U.S., British, Russian and French control respectively, offers a fertile field for the application of content analysis techniques developed in this country during the war. From the start of the quadripartite occupation Berliners have been aware that the press in the Soviet sector of Berlin differs radically from that in the sectors controlled by the Western Powers. Differences have not been confined to the editorial pages but have extended to the news columns. It is of particular importance to attempt to isolate criteria of selection at this time, since a critical news-print shortage limits nearly all German papers to one page or less of world news, and only a small percentage of available dispatches can be given space.

This article focuses on the papers presented at the conference on communication agencies at the University of Chicago on August 4, 1941. These papers may be grouped under four categories: first, effects of communications on public opinions; second, implications of communications research for social science; third, implications of communications research for public institutions and fourth, governmental control of public communications. Under the first category, the papers reported on effects of print, radio, film and forum. Under the second category, sociologists and professors examined the implications of communications research for the science and practice of politics. Under the third category, papers were presented concerning implication for public institutions. The fourth category consists of generalizations supported both by examples and by frequencies with which typical themes occur in the news content.

This article presents information on economic trends affecting the newspaper as an opinion forming medium. Among current tendencies in the daily newspaper field, one stands out that has become more and more disquieting to both advocates and critics of the industry. Information related to the extend to which trend toward daily newspaper monopoly proceeded in the cities of the U.S. No effort is made here to recount again the vast multiplicity of factors, that have made for and maintained local daily paper monopolies. They include finance, labor union, personnel, wire franchise, feature rights, national and local advertising, distribution, and other considerations. The number of American cities with competing daily newspapers is diminishing by about 10 per cent a year. In short only a few dozen U.S. cities can observe freedom of the press lifted in the daily newspaper field above the realms of academic discussion and made vital. The development of the more extreme type of local monopoly, one-daily-newspaper cities, further emphasizes the change that is coming over the industry.

The article takes a look at the American attitudes toward Japan and China in 1937-38. The Chinese Cultural Society of New York published in October 1937 a reprint of 39 editorials from American papers on the Far Eastern crisis. The editor, M. Hsitien Lin wrote in the foreword "Of some 5,000 editorials which have been examined, there is none that justifies Japanese aggression or condemns Chinese resistance. In the American press Japan is almost universally treated as the aggressor and China as the victim in the undeclared war. As to American policy, the press generally favors neither extreme isolationism nor political entanglements or alliances, but a golden mean, whereby world peace, it is hoped, may be maintained." The present study is designed to test the validity of this impression as well as to test the utility of a method of attitude measurement by press sampling. It is impossible here to enter into a discussion of the relationship between beliefs as to facts and emotional attitudes such as are measured by the indices used, except to suggest that attitudes, which are at first accompanied by emotions, may in time become beliefs regarding "facts" which are taken for granted.

Editorial treatment of lynchings offers an interesting and revealing study of public attitudes toward this peculiarly American custom. Environment and not personal inclination of editors determines the tone of opinion in almost every instance. As individuals, they are unanimously opposed to mob violence but, as editors who are caught in the general atmosphere of a given trade territory, they do not reflect their own ideas but those of the people upon whose goodwill their papers depend for revenue. They find themselves in the difficult position of a rider who must sit two horses at the same time, one standing, facing backward, the other moving rapidly forward unencumbered by the harness of tradition. They must satisfy that part of the watchful public pressing in closest and upon whose approval they must rely for immediate revenue. Editors, with few exceptions, condone lynchings by offering reasons for lynchers which are in effect sympathetic excuses defending the right of citizens under provocation to take the law into their own hands and constitute themselves judge, jury, and executioner all at the same time.

Despite the increasing salience of issues related to free trade, research on citizen preferences over trade is sparse, and largely limited to economic explanations related to objective exposure. The present paper extends this literature by examining the psychological sources of the protectionist impulse. More specifically, I theoretically and empirically examine how citizens' chronic needs for security and certainty, key traits identified by recent work in the political realm, influence their preferences for protectionism. Examining data from three different national surveys in the U.S. context, I find strong support for the role of these dispositions. In addition to extending our understanding of the antecedents of trade preferences, the present paper has implications for the study of personality and politics, suggesting heterogeneity in the relationship of dispositions to ideology across issue domains. I also discuss the broader implications for American politics, arguing that these findings suggest latent tensions within contemporary party coalitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses articles in the issue written in response to the authors' article on data quality in nonprobability sampling within the issue. Topics, including response rates to probability surveys, survey design, demographic variables, research bias, propensity modeling and adjustment methods in research, are discussed.

The use of administrative records--data collected by governmental agencies or commercial businesses in the course of administering a program or service--for household enumeration may be one way to significantly reduce Decennial Census costs, particularly in nonresponse follow-up (NRFU). Administrative records suffer the complications of big data in that they are collected for purposes not related to Census enumeration, yet contain a wealth of information relevant to Census enumeration. This paper describes a modeling approach to determine which administrative data are sufficiently reliable to proxy for a field response in a way that reduces costs and balances quality. Specifically, the approach is to (1) develop and assess models to determine characteristics of good-quality administrative records via a retrospective study of linked field and administrative data; and (2) choose a quality threshold, in a statistically defensible way, at which administrative records take the place of field responses. This paper presents empirical results illustrating the cost-quality trade-off of this approach applied to Census enumeration. We assess three classification techniques to further detail the cost-quality trade-off and allow flexibility in balancing predictive power and implementation complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on the fifty-second conference of the American Association for Public Opinion Research held on May 15-18, 1997 in Norfolk, Virginia. The conference focused on the future of survey research on new methods of data collection, problems in maintaining response rates, and the latest methods for developing questionnaires. And there were many papers on that highly visible test of the accuracy of surveys related with the presidential elections. The session, entitled "Controversies in Pre-Election Polling," featured researchers C. Everett Ladd, Kathy Frankovic, Frank Newport, and John Zogby. Frank Newport, from the Gallup Organization, led off the session. He presented statistics on the margin of error in the presidential poll results going back to the 1940s. Several other sessions concerned the problems and impact of different modes of data collection. Two of these focused on the latest technology for doing surveys, the uses of the Internet for collecting data and disseminating the results. Two other sessions explored the impact of computer-assisted interviewing.

This paper discusses the Chinese indoctrination methods for prisoners of war (POW). In the wars of the last 50 to 100 years, American soldiers who fell into enemy hands experienced a variety of physical and emotional hardships, but the Chinese have made the first major attempt to produce defectors and collaborators among American POWs and to indoctrinate them in an alien political ideology. The article does not propose to consider the Chinese aims in conducting this enterprise, nor does it discuss in any detail how the indoctrination program affected men. Instead, this paper will present a brief account of the specific experiences of the POWs from the time they were captured until the time they were repatriated. To some extent, it will be possible to present a chronological account. It should be pointed out, however, that most of the significant experiences were occurring contemporaneously. Therefore, it has been chosen to organize them into some social psychological categories rather than simply to recount them as they occurred.

This article reports on the study conducted in the United States to find out whether effective newspaper sampling is possible or not. To select the sample purposively in two equal increments of 50 newspapers each, the universe was stratified with respect to certain objective characteristics, the characteristics of an ideal 50 paper sub-sample were determined, and two sub-samples were selected deliberately with characteristics matching those of the ideal sub-sample. These were then coded for certain items of military interest, and results from the two compared. In conducting the study, the sampling universe was limited to general circulation. Then the two samples were compared with the help of correlation method. Correlation between the content of the two samples was close enough to justify the conclusion that effective newspaper sampling is possible. It is based upon the consistent, day-to-day, subject-by-subject correlation between the two sub-samples.

The article focuses on the book "The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1937-1940," compiled and collated Samuel I. Rosenman. Four volumes covering the second administration, i.e. 1937-1940, have just been published to supplement volumes of the first four years. They should be read because they refresh the memory with surprising effect, they show U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt in new moments when many of his off-the-record press conference comments are now released, and above all because they give a complete view of the President as he wants to be known instead of the spasmodic glimpses afforded by the isolated daily event. They give immediate insight to works of a President who can already be counted among the outstanding men of that office. The press conference excerpts are the most interesting items in these volumes. The informal give and take between the President and correspondents throughout these four volumes, sometimes in bad feeling and sometimes in great good feeling, is probably as revealing about American national being as anything that can ever be said by any President.

The article presents the characteristics of the press during months of July, August and September of 1940, which were strongly reminiscent of July, August, and September of 1916. Amongst the similarities it is seen that during both the periods a Democratic President was running for re-election. Fear of being involved in a European war was topmost in the minds of the voters, and the national defense and foreign policies were hotly debated issues of the campaign. Especially there is a striking similarity in the attacks upon the administration in power for "failure to adequately build up the national defense." The National Newspaper Week that began on Monday, September 30 was devoted to making the American public aware of the value of a free press. The U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Wendell L. Willkie, the Republican candidate, wrote National Newspaper Week letters emphasizing the necessity of a free press in upholding democracy, and most of the daily papers in the country published their letters. All of the straight Republican and independent Republican newspapers in the country supported Willkie's candidacy for the Presidency. Less than one-half of the newspapers which described themselves as independent Democratic were supporting Roosevelt.

Student Opinion Surveys of America, with headquarters at the University of Texas, was established in December 1938 to provide a scientific sampling referendum for the U.S. colleges. College newspapers were chosen in strategic locations from lists of top-notchers in the annual competitions sponsored by collegiate press associations. A cross-section determined from figures of the U.S. Office of Education and other sources called for an accurate geographical distribution according to student concentrations; so invitations to a selected number of key papers were sent out last fall. In six months the Surveys have conducted studies of the average college man and woman on thirty-two separate questions, many of them in related series. The Surveys definitely show that there is truth in the familiar statement that young people are more liberal in their attitudes than older persons. On social questions students would class themselves as liberal thinkers. Over three-fourths oppose the return of prohibition, only one third think collegians drink too much, and six out of every ten admit they do drink. If they had their way, a blood test before marriage to detect venereal disease would be required by law. And they would make sex education compulsory in colleges.

On November 26, 1936, the Popular Front Ministry of France, of which Leon Blum was President of the Council, submitted to the Chamber of Deputies a series of proposed laws which would have completely changed the regulations regarding the press. With only slight modifications the Chamber accepted the proposals, but Senate amendments removed the bill's teeth, and a deadlock ensued between the two houses of the French parliament. This deadlock remained unbroken until establishment of government by decree. Subsequently several attempts were made to secure passage of bills which embodied certain features of the Blum proposals, or which in some other manner suggested changes in the existing press regulations, but they too were either rejected or postponed. To a considerable extent, press susceptibility to venality results from the fact that it is very difficult for a French journal to be a paying concern by using merely ordinary channels of revenue. Low prices for daily papers have become traditional in France, but, more important than that, advertising has never developed into the gold mine for the press that it has become in the United States and in England.

This article is a content analysis of two newspapers that is designed to reveal the extent of bias in reporting the investigation of the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) by the House Subcommittee on Legislative Oversight has presented an opportunity to test news bias in newspapers. The investigation facilitated testable hypotheses, even at its inception, since, with one notable exception which will be dealt with later in this study, the trend of the investigation was predictable from the moment the "leaks" occurred that were attributed to the then committee counsel, Bernard Schwartz. Content analysis was employed to discover "bias" in the news presentations of a Republican and an Independent-Democratic newspaper. The Republican newspaper was disposed to favor the FCC and the Independent-Democratic newspaper to be hostile to it. A substantial amount of relative bias was found in the news presentation, in relation to both "attention-space" categories and news content.

This article reports on the proceedings of the forty-fifth annual conference of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) and the World Association for Public Opinion Research (WAPOR), held in May 1989, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The four-day Conference consisted of 27 AAPOR paper panels, 5 WAPOR paper panels, 15 roundtables, two plenaries, and one didactic session. Together, these sessions included over 175 different presentations. The tally of all names listed in the program-including session chairpersons, discussants, roundtable panelists, paper givers and coauthors-indicates that 280 different persons contributed to the intellectual content of the conference program in some direct fashion. The two, evening plenary sessions focused on "Perestroika, Glasnost, and Public Opinion in the Soviet Union" and "Newspapers and Television as Election Pollsters: Do They Do Anything Right?" The didactic session was on "Designing Good Graphs." The AAPOR Award for exceptionally distinguished achievement was presented to Herbert E. Krugman.

Many studies in various countries have found that telephone and internet surveys of probability samples yielded data that were more accurate than internet surveys of nonprobability samples, but some authors have challenged this conclusion. This paper describes a replication and an expanded comparison of data collected in the United States, using a variety of probability and nonprobability sampling methods, using a set of 50 measures of 40 benchmark variables, larger than any used in the past, and assessing accuracy using a new metric for this literature: root mean squared error. Despite substantial drops in response rates since a prior comparison, the probability samples interviewed by telephone or the internet were the most accurate. Internet surveys of a probability sample combined with an opt-in sample were less accurate; least accurate were internet surveys of opt-in panel samples. These results were not altered by implementing poststratification using demographics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]