A MOST AMERICAN THING?

The lineage of survey methodology in the United States can be traced back to turn-of-the-century social surveys, the mail and voting polls popularized by the Literary Digest, and the large-scale sample surveys of George Gallup and Elmo Roper through the 1920s and 1930s. Surveys continued to be associated with market and media research, and failed to gain prestige among academic circles until the onset of World War II initiated a relocation of scholarly activity toward governmental research. It was at wartime survey centers such as the Surveys Division of the Office of War Information, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the Research Branch of the War Department that the affinity between the social sciences and survey research began to crystallize. Under the leadership of Rensis Likert, Samuel Stouffer, and Paul Lazarsfeld, wartime research centers evolved into the University of Michigan's Survey Research Center, the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago, and the Bureau of Applied Social Research (BASR) at Columbia University. In 1945, the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) and the National Research Council established a Joint Committee on the Measurement of Opinion, Attitudes, and Consumer Wants, further bolstering the scholarly reputation of survey methodology.Footnote ¹⁴

In the decades following the war, the seeming need to move away from the foregoing “parochialism” of American social scientific endeavors occasioned the emergence of a “new breed of social scientist” for whom there was to be “no land too remote, no village too ordinary or too primitive, no governmental process too imposing or too esoteric” for the study of modernization.Footnote ¹⁵ Social scientists began to view the world as a laboratory at their disposal, and “knowing the world” and “knowing the enemy” came to be identified with “national interest” in the United States in light of decolonization and the perceived threat of the Soviet model of development.Footnote ¹⁶ Research agendas set by private foundations and governmental centers were aligned with U.S. initiatives to promote “development” through the extension of technical aid and know-how abroad, ranging from President Truman's Point Four Program to Kennedy's U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Such initiatives were means to consolidate a “brave new world—a liberal internationalist era” with the help of academic research centers that were to contribute to the production of area-specific knowledge and developmental projects alike.Footnote ¹⁷

The expansion in the regional application of social scientific scholarship occasioned both a blurring of interdisciplinary boundaries under the purview of area studies and a reorientation in the objects of inquiry, approaches, and methods employed by each field. Political scientists, for instance, followed the lead of their peers in social psychology and sociology, who were exploring the tailored fit between personality scales and the aptitudes of survey research.Footnote ¹⁸ “The distinctive feature of non-Western politics as a field for study,” according to modernization theorists, was “the basic cultural conflict taking place in these areas [and] the researcher must be especially sensitive to problems related to changing value patterns in the society.”Footnote ¹⁹ Survey methods, which were already being employed to discern voting behavior and public opinion at home, could be rendered compatible with both the growing interest in the developing world and the tasks assigned to the new social scientist, among them to contribute “to the endeavor to modernize the lives of the people in developing countries.”Footnote ²⁰ Given their roots in reformist Progressive-era studies and their postwar employment in channeling psychological warfare into mass communications research through government monies, surveys were to aid the conscious, at times covert efforts to uplift and modernize the non-West.Footnote ²¹ The prowess of the methodology, as one researcher put it, stemmed from its utility in not merely capturing and measuring processes of change but inducing it: it was the widespread dissemination of surveys that led “ordinary men” to appear “more enlightened and scientific in their approach to social problems.”Footnote ²²

The replicable, orderly, and standardized nature of survey research rendered it apposite for the task of measuring and recording social change. Survey methodology was rich with the attractions of “medium-range” analysis for those concerned with the study of modernization in particular. Longitudinal or panel studies enabled trend analysis over long periods of time, suggesting that once a survey was conducted targeting a particular sample of students, rural populations, or the elite then that data could be compared with a new set of findings three, five, or even ten years down the line. This would make it easier to capture processes of change for the social scientist “seeking general principles—even laws—of political modernization.”Footnote ²³

This optimism regarding the seeming fit between the needs of modernization theory and survey methodology was only exceeded by the enthusiasm for the modernity of the technique itself. The expansion of the focus of research from national samples to cross-national or cross-cultural surveys seemed to proceed along an inexorable path, one researcher noted, a move along “what might imperialistically be termed the manifest destiny of survey research in an extensive sense.”Footnote ²⁴ Surveys, by gathering results more “tangible and practical” than the “abstract and theoretical” knowledge yielded by other methods, helped “promote the scientific study of politics by forcing improvements in the rigor of research procedures, the quality of measures, and the techniques for certifying facts.”Footnote ²⁵ Survey researchers’ sanguine faith in the technological and scientific merits of their work, however, was undermined by their own reservations about the applicability of that methodology to foreign locales.Footnote ²⁶ Skepticism regarding transportability surfaced in relation to a purported equivalence between the “modernity” of the technique and the “modernity” of settings amenable to being surveyed. If surveys proved capable of serving the “cause of social change,” it was not clear if their application elsewhere necessitated some degree of change having already taken place there, since the method was “essentially a technique for the study of the ‘alphabetized,’ mobile, individualistic and market-oriented societies of the West.”Footnote ²⁷ For those who employed the survey in non-Western areas, then, it remained an approximation at best since it appeared to be “better adapted” to “modern society.”Footnote ²⁸

Such reservations are a testament to the stakes involved for “the scientific imperialist eager to expand the realm of survey research.”Footnote ²⁹ On one hand, it seemed that there were preconditions for survey work, which for Stein Rokkan included centralization and bureaucratization, sufficient levels of literacy, and cross-local mobility, and this suggested a role for “survey organizations [as] ‘nationalizing’ agencies.”Footnote ³⁰ Yet, obstacles along the path seemed insurmountable. Frequently cited among the hindrances beleaguering the field researcher were problems in the standardization of procedures and questionnaires; the shortage of local facilities, trained native interviewers, and IBM equipment; unreliable census records that triggered sampling errors; and incomplete maps leading to difficulties in locating respondents. The single most trying predicament, though, appeared to be of the attitudinal sort: the persistence of “evasion, courtesy, fear, silence and outright lying” in respondent behavior demanded various measures for “verbosity, sophistication, credulity, conformity, extremism in responses, inability to differentiate, among other things.”Footnote ³¹ While researchers attributed such unruly behavior to an overall lack of familiarity with the method, it also provided fruitful ground for further reflections upon the mindset of local respondents and assertions of difference along cultural lines.

In 1958, a special issue of the Public Opinion Quarterly was devoted to the problems of attitude research in the modernizing non-West, addressing areas as diverse as Indonesia and Iran, Uruguay and Chile, Turkey, and “Africa South of the Sahara.” In his editorial introduction to the issue, Daniel Lerner noted the affinity between survey research and “participant societies,” which he equated with modern societies, and presented the opinion-holder as akin to the “cash customer and the voter.”Footnote ³² Susanne and Lloyd Rudolph described the problems they encountered during survey research in India and questioned the presuppositions of their method, noting the “flaws in the assumption that most people hold opinions on a broad range of issues and are capable of articulating them.”Footnote ³³ If the respondents they encountered were not acquainted with the premise of opinion-holding and articulation, they also seemed unfamiliar with the method itself: “The scholar engaged in survey research who presents himself to the American housewife can do so with considerable confidence of a friendly and understanding reception…. But the interviewer who faces an illiterate Harijan woman in village India is not likely to rouse any familiar images or ideas.”Footnote ³⁴ The image of the ubiquitous pollster at home was frequently evoked as evidence of American respondents’ exceptional amenability to being surveyed.

Elsewhere, Sidney Verba noted the specific characteristics of American society that made survey research an effective technique in that setting, such as impersonal relationships, an inquisitive mindset, and the ease with which respondents spoke to strangers, as well as a “greater understanding of scientific inquiry; greater comprehension of an ‘opinion’ (an individual statement of preference that cannot be considered right or wrong); greater ability to imagine oneself in hypothetical situations; and so forth.”Footnote ³⁵ Political scientist Frank Bonilla reiterated the limitations of survey research abroad: not only was it beset by the absence of articulate respondents, equipped with the necessary “social skills and intellectual capacities,” but also conspicuous was the lack of “some experience with free and easy communication” with the interviewer, who was instead perceived as a “total stranger.”Footnote ³⁶ This preoccupation with the ease of communication reflected long-standing regulations regarding the interview setting, which had to “have all the warm and personality exchange of a conversation, with the clarity and guidelines of scientific searching.”Footnote ³⁷ In Bonilla's account of overseas research, by contrast, the interviewer emerges as an unsolicited guest who nevertheless finds in himself the prerogative to set the dictates of the dialogic interaction. His demands appear exacting, his questions “embarrassing, gratuitously aggressive, or even dangerous,” and his very presence a nuisance at best.Footnote ³⁸ Such interviews could be viewed more fruitfully as “sticky engagements,” indicative of “the awkward, unequal, unstable, and creative qualities of interconnection across difference.”Footnote ³⁹

For those who employed the survey method abroad, it seemed more suited to the American setting that fostered and perfected it, given the ambivalence in language, hitches in research design, and seeming hostility to interviewers encountered elsewhere. The question remained: if the task of the survey researcher was to measure and record attitudinal patterns, to what extent should respondent behavior vis-à-vis the interview setting be figured into indices of modernization? For Lerner, opinion holding itself could be factored into the analysis as a variable, thereby facilitating a reading of silences in the interview setting not as “the loss of data, but [itself] an important datum.”Footnote ⁴⁰

STICKY CONVERSATIONS

In May 1963, the Committee on Comparative Politics of the SSRC held a conference in New York on “Survey Research in Developing Areas.” During that meeting, Lerner enumerated the methodological and administrative requirements underpinning the types of research that would help explicate processes of political modernization. Survey research, he explained, ought to be comparable and replicable insofar as it was particularly suited to the task of understanding and explaining the modernization process, which “is (or should be) relatively geography-free and even culture-free in its principal components.”Footnote ⁴¹ Citing his own experience with the Middle East surveys conducted by BASR at Columbia University, Lerner insisted that it was the opportunity to test the “ideal types” against data from seven countries that “made it possible for us … to move from a theoretically-derived typology to empirically-determined generalizations—i.e., from what is merely plausible to what is highly probable.”Footnote ⁴² If it was the comparative nature of the BASR data that helped generate a universally applicable, scientifically sound model of modernization, the explanatory prowess of the survey method was just as expedient for capturing the regularities intrinsic to that model.

While Lerner extolled survey research for its capacity to account for the “general effects” of modernization, divorced from both geography and culture, he was not entirely forthright about the origins of the Middle East survey data at the SSRC meeting.Footnote ⁴³ Three years prior to the publication of the book, Lerner co-wrote an article with David Riesman and divulged:

Over the course of its journey between different institutions, the Middle East survey was thoroughly steeped in expectations and obligations. The study was motivated in part by State Department concerns about “Soviet jamming of Voice of America radio signals,” and the original questionnaires aimed to assess the direct influence mass media could have on Middle Eastern audiences.Footnote ⁴⁵ Lerner was explicit about his concern that while “Middle Easterners more than ever want the modern package,” they nonetheless “reject the label ‘made in U.S.A.’ (or, for that matter, ‘made in USSR’).”Footnote ⁴⁶ He thus placed the countries under examination on a developmental spectrum, which reflected strategic interests and alliances in the region. Lerner's categorization contrasted the “modernizing” tendencies of pro-Western Turkey and Lebanon with the subversive elements of Nasserite Egypt. The performative aspirations of survey methodology came to reflect its origins in and compatibility with psychological warfare and propaganda work. The travels of the VOA survey—conceived in one setting, conducted in another by trained native interviewers, and coded and (re)analyzed along different research agendas—also reflected the changes and consistencies in the theoretical and methodological inclinations of Lerner, acquired during his tenures at various research institutions.

Born in Brooklyn in 1917 to Russian émigré parents, Lerner studied English literature at New York University until serving as the chief editor of the Intelligence Branch of the Psychological Warfare Division of the U.S. Army during World War II. His participation in survey studies that attempted to measure the effect of Allied propaganda on military and civilian populations in Germany would make him a suitable match for the Middle East study, whose “central rationale” was “psychological warfare.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Lerner was asked to analyze the VOA data upon his arrival in 1951 at BASR, which was then under the direction of Paul Lazarsfeld. Though he was one of the several rapporteurs who analyzed the data for VOA, Lerner was responsible for the sections on Turkey from the outset.Footnote ⁴⁸ The answers to the survey were initially to be coded according to Lazarsfeld's theory of the two-step flow model of communication. But by the time Lerner moved to MIT as professor of sociology and senior research staff at the Center for International Studies (CENIS) in 1953, it was agreed to recode the data in accordance with an opinion-range index reflecting Lerner's three-fold typology of modern, transitional, and traditional societies.Footnote ⁴⁹ The Center, itself notoriously sponsored by the Central Intelligence Agency, thus financed the reanalysis of the data as well as follow-up fieldwork in 1954. The latter included Lerner's trip to Balgat, Ankara, which inspired his arresting depiction, to be discussed presently, of the Grocer and the Chief as “the symbolic protagonists of the drama of modernization.”Footnote ⁵⁰

Lerner's early ruminations on the Turkey data came to inform his conceptualization of modernization, which appeared to be correlated with “socioeconomic status, urban residence, and media exposure,” and also the capacity for “egoidentification” or “introjection,” which “teaches us to know the roles of others and how to assume them on appropriate occasions.”Footnote ⁵¹ While the surveys were employed to gather verifiable data about their respondents, they relied on the subjects’ ability to generate a myriad of fictions. For Lerner, the prerequisite for modernity was a “great characterological transformation,” traced through the psychic mobility of the individual and his or her acquisition of empathic skills that “spell modernity.”Footnote ⁵² This tautological formulation held that the encounter between the actual self and the hypothetical self (be it the interviewer or the head of a radio station) was at once the condition and signifier of a modern mindset. Lerner thus constructed an “empathy index,” for which he relied on a series of projective questions, ranging from the ability to imagine oneself as the editor of a newspaper, in charge of a radio station, or the head of a government to living in a different country from one's own. His index assigned 0's, 1's, and in rare cases, 2's (“chooses non-adjacent country in which one could live if not in native country”) to the responses, at the expense of the rather detailed reasons provided by the respondents when prompted to imagine themselves assigned to improbable tasks or dwelling in foreign settings in the open-ended question and answer setting.Footnote ⁵³

Although these responses were lost in the reported form of condensed scores and continuums that provided an “opinion range,” their presentation in numerical form attested to the character of the survey setting itself as an experiment in modernization. Lerner's very understanding of modernization, explicitly defined through the operationalization of an empathy index, conceived as the ability to imagine oneself outside of the self, suggested the inextricable link between the research method and that which it sought to explain. “The manner in which persons perceive the interview situation,” Lerner insisted, “is a datum on their readiness and competence to participate personally in essentially impersonal social enterprises.”Footnote ⁵⁴ He thus believed that failure to abide by the interactional prerequisites of the survey indicated an inability to partake of the modern or empathetic mindset, since “the very nature of the interview requires a certain ability to identify with others.”Footnote ⁵⁵

Lerner's investment in the performative dimensions of the interview situation suggests that his interest went beyond the textual artifact of the questionnaire, and took into account the productive capacities of the survey event itself. The surveys were conducted not merely to measure or describe, but to occasion the performance of the very categories, “modern,” “transitional,” and “traditional” that they sought to explain. The crafting of these typologies rested on a series of omissions and misreadings that allowed Lerner to identify the capacity for empathy (or lack thereof) as indicative of different attitudes, mindsets, and indeed “national characteristics” in different settings.

In a series of elite interviews he conducted in Europe shortly after the Middle East project, for example, Lerner found that the “French respondents were most troubled by projective questions—showing themselves not unable but unwilling to empathize on questions of public policy.”Footnote ⁵⁶ If the French found the “role-playing” questions frivolous or silly, it was at best a testament to their opinionated predispositions since, “There is a vast psychic difference between the illiterate and untutored traditionalism of Middle Eastern peasant and the traditionalism which prevails among the contemporary elite of France. The Frenchman has acquired his traditionalism as an intellectual discipline and an explicit psychic code…. Whereas the Arab peasant usually has no sense of possible alternatives to his traditional ways but simply ‘does what comes naturally,’ the Frenchman has a very sophisticated rationale for his conduct.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Lerner delineates two distinct mindsets in this passage: while both sets of respondents’ aversion to the hypothetical questions elicit their labeling as traditional, the category itself remains variable, if not fraught, in its application across disparate contexts. Even though Lerner was aware of the imperative to devise and stage the categories of modernization theory, then, his assignation of different populations under its labels nonetheless relied on preconceptions that came at the expense of the particularities and nuances that otherwise characterized the interview setting.

Lerner's differential reading suggests that the survey method does more than report its findings; it expects, demands at every turn, that the interviewee transport himself or herself out of the “traditional” environment (be it a coffeehouse or the subject's own house) so as to be placed in the modern, “impersonal” setting of the interview. The imperative to answer questions, to hold and articulate opinions in a predesignated manner, is an implicit corollary of participation in that setting. In his evaluation of the Turkey data, Lerner insists that it is the traditional subjects, not yet sufficiently exposed to mass media or cultivated in the ways of the modern participant style, who find the question and answer situation “deadly earnest” and “can more easily imagine destroying the self than making the effort to project it beyond the familiar world into the strange.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Unaccustomed to the norms and rules dictated and regulated by the survey setting, these traditional Turks remain improper interview subjects. Their inability to imagine themselves in an alien context, in turn, tarnishes their modernity score, gauged strictly in quantitative terms. The survey aims to interpellate both its respondent and its subject matter: its claim at representation—necessarily condensed, seemingly disciplinary—is simultaneously a claim to its own legitimacy. Foreign to its locale of application, the survey demands answers that will have to be rendered proper to its object of inquiry. By the interactional standards of the interview setting, modern subjects are those who are willing for interlocution with strangers, but only in a manner predetermined by the expectations of those who set the terms of proper discourse.

In their initial assessment of the Middle East surveys, Lerner and Riesman elaborate on the ideal survey respondent by way of illustrating what they are not. Citing a part of the interview with the Chief of Balgat, who answers a question about whether or not he gives advice to fellow villagers (“Yes, that is my main duty, to give advice.… About all that I or you could imagine, even about their wives and how to handle them, and how to cure their sick cow”), Lerner and Riesman immediately comment: “It would seem from this exchange that the Chief could not project himself into the interviewer's place (conceivably, he aggressively did not care to), else he would quickly have realized that the latter could imagine advice on other matters than the cure and care of females.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Lerner and Riesman insist that it is the task of the respondent to offer unconditional cooperation by putting himself in the place of the interviewer, revealing, in the process, a profound misreading of the Chief's willingness to anticipate, perhaps even empathize with his interlocutor's expectations regarding the requirements of his job. In the authors’ account, by contrast, the Chief's refusal to abide by the terms of the proper interview exchange arrests him in traditional time, a time encapsulated with hierarchies, obsolete conceit, and an inability to “compare, equate or differentiate” personal and public problems.Footnote ⁶⁰

The respondent's attitudinal shortcomings are also linked to his cognitive and linguistic abilities in this account. Following their depiction of the episode with the Chief who ostensibly could not imagine anything but the “cure and care of females,” Lerner and Riesman comment on the centrality of sufficient skills of communication in a footnote that cites an assessment of interviews conducted in Arkansas in the aftermath of a tornado.Footnote ⁶¹ In that example, they observe that the “lower-class hillbilly respondents,” who, like their Turkish counterparts proved incapable of putting themselves in the interviewer's place, “would plunge him in medias res without telling him so, shift place or pronoun without realizing that he could not follow, and so on.”Footnote ⁶² Seemingly surprised to find parallels between the “hillbilly” respondents of Arkansas and the traditional Chief of Balgat in Ankara, the authors nevertheless make a gesture toward recognizing the potential subversion and tactical prevarication that the survey unwittingly produces:

In this turn of events, it is no longer the Chief preoccupied with cows or the lower-class witnesses of the Arkansas tornado, barely capable of keeping their pronouns straight, who are prone to ridicule. In the absence of interlocutors who will abide by their discursive and imaginary dictates, it is the interviewers themselves who are thrown into unfamiliar terrain. Still, Lerner finds it easier to equate the Ankarans’ and Arkansans’ reframing strategies than to assign the same sense of traditionalism to the French elite and Arab peasants. In both cases, a more nuanced account of the variations, as well as the overlaps, between the different respondent populations is purposefully extracted from the textual account, lest it undermine the certitude of the archetypes that are carefully crafted and staged through the interview process.

The questionnaires used in the Turkey surveys, some of which are catalogued along with Lerner's private papers at the Special Collections at MIT, reveal a variety of resilient responses that did not make it into his musings on modernization in published form.Footnote ⁶⁴ These refusals to engage with the survey questions automatically disqualified the respondents from being categorized as modern subjects, capable of empathy in general, or of conversing with the interviewer in a proper manner in particular. Oftentimes, however, their refusals indicated less a lack of capacity for imagination than a realistic assessment of their standing or interests in life. Some said they lacked the education or credentials for running a newspaper, others that they were not interested in that line of work. Another replied that he would resign immediately from the post of president since he considered himself unqualified for the job.

One particularly unruly respondent objected to the wording of the survey questions and the limited categories imposed by the answer range. Asked to provide two defining characteristics on five different nations, the respondent demanded: “If I am to respond that the Americans are industrious and the British intelligent, would I be saying that it is not possible for the British to be industrious and the Americans to be intelligent?” He added, “I do not think questions of such importance and complexities should be answered in a condensed manner, like vitamin pills.”Footnote ⁶⁵ In fact, a lack of imagination in numerical terms, guaranteed to earn low scores on the Lerner modernity index, was a commonplace occurrence among those interviewed. “I am against statistics in general,” another respondent insisted, but his aversion was directed toward the survey in particular: “The questions aren't judicious enough. In life, all is not black and white than is grey. And grey is a ‘nuance.’”Footnote ⁶⁶ In addition to being restrictive, the questions seemed demeaning to some. Told that he could ask about anything he wanted to find out about America, one respondent, otherwise reluctant to adopt the quantitative terminology of the survey, inquired: “What is the height of the Empire State Building? How many cars the Ford produces a year? [sic]” “Sarcastically, resents the question,” added the interviewer in parentheses.Footnote ⁶⁷

Such occurrences suggest that the interviews were far from proceeding along the impersonal and cordial lines envisioned by the researcher. No matter how hard the survey tried to produce a particular kind of verbal exchange and social interaction based on civility, tolerance, and empathy, such regulations were broken in the moment of survey enactment. The retorts, silences, refusals to think in numbers and condense all into statistically communicable “vitamin pills” remained antithetical to the categories proclaimed by the survey. That is why they were rendered inferior to the coded categories, erased from the narrative, and expelled from what Lerner believed to be his rigorous means of highly probable, empirically determined generalizations. The sample survey's claim at representation was precisely achieved through such exclusions and attenuations. For all the emphasis on empathy in Lerner's communicative theory of modernization, not voicing opinions in the interview setting was presumed to amount to having no opinion at all.

What Lerner neglects to include in his scientific report is what the social scientist resorts to, albeit in selective manner, as “qualitative support,” or, as Lerner does quite elegantly in his own work, as narrative device. Yet these partial inclusions, which surface as mere plot devices and intermittent depictions of the protagonists involved, only underscore that which is expunged from the condensed, mediated, and codified account. Why else, we want to know, are people unlikely to want to move to the United States, indeed wishing they would die instead, aside from a putative lack of capacity for imagining themselves elsewhere? Responded one, “I am convinced that living a mechanized life is far from agreeable.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Inquired another, “Why is it that while acquiring wealth [Americans] didn't acquire the necessary culture to go with this wealth? Why do they still insist on segregation while claiming to be the best democratic country?”Footnote ⁶⁹ What else did these survey researchers sacrifice by their endless cataloguing and (re)coding?

It would be inaccurate to suggest that Lerner neglected all mention of the verbatim answers recorded by the interviewers. A student of literature before the war, Lerner was no stranger to the narrative category and he masterfully employed literary devices, evident in particular in his parable of the modernizing Grocer and the traditional Chief, which serves as the introduction to his Passing of Traditional Society. This story intrigued Lerner more than any other while working through hundreds of interviews, and led him to proclaim that the “personal meaning of modernization in underdeveloped lands can be traced, in miniature, through the lives of Balgati—The Grocer and The Chief.”Footnote ⁷⁰

A “prophet” ahead of his time, Balgat's Grocer “lives in a different world, an expansive world, populated more actively with imaginings and fantasies.” He “‘sees’ things the others do not see, ‘lives’ in a world populated by imaginings alien to the constrictive world of the others.”Footnote ⁷¹ In contrast to the Chief who held the only radio in Balgat in 1950 and tuned in only for news from Korea, Lerner cites the Grocer's aesthetic preferences approvingly: “It was in a movie that he had first glimpsed what a real grocery store could be like—‘with walls made of iron sheets, top to floor and side to side, and on them standing myriads of round boxes, clean and all the same dressed, like soldiers in a great parade.’ This fleeting glimpse of what sounds like the Campbell Soup section of an A&P supermarket had provided the Grocer with an abiding image of how his fantasy world might look.”Footnote ⁷²

In addition to providing an elaborate description of the supermarket shelves the Grocer pined for, the passage captures and confirms, for Lerner, the crucial link between a distinctly modern(izing) capacity for empathy and the ability to imagine otherwise foreign places, lifestyles, and indeed, arrays of soup cans. Furthermore, the Grocer's fantasy world is facilitated by the corresponding prerequisite for the modernity index—the ability for psychic mobility, mediated through the means of mass communication. Thus disposed toward the orderly display of Campbell soup cans, the Grocer's fantasy world not only accommodates that vision, but is readily articulated in the interview setting.

The Grocer thus surfaces as the paragon of the proper interview subject. His wide range of imagination is accompanied by a capacity for anticipating and providing the responses that are expected of him. Asked how he would rule, the Grocer responds, “He would make roads for the villagers to come to towns to see the world and would not let them stay in their holes all their life.”Footnote ⁷³ His capacity for psychic mobility accommodates the physical mobility of his fellow Balgati—hence his position as a vanguard in both the interview setting and the modernization process. Unlike the Chief who cannot imagine leaving the place where he was born, the Grocer can readily imagine himself living in America: “Indeed he seemed fully prepared, as a man does when he has already posed the question to himself many times.”Footnote ⁷⁴ These instances, cited profusely and admiringly by Lerner, are indications of the survey method succeeding at its task, which is not merely to procure data (and delineate its structure, content, and contours), but also to occasion the performance of modernizing subjectivities.

While the Grocer, a proxy for all transitional Turks in Lerner's scheme, comes closest to embodying the ideal respondent in the village of Balgat, “He is not yet capable of the Modern Turk's introjective technique;” though he is “learning to project imaginatively, [he is] not yet stretching his imagination too far.”Footnote ⁷⁵ It is for this reason that the modernized native interviewer, Tosun, is perplexed by the effective means of communication on the part of the Grocer, who otherwise seems “a very unimpressive type,” and “even wore some sort of a necktie.”Footnote ⁷⁶ This detectable tone of distaste is telling for Lerner: Tosun's contempt for the Grocer must have stemmed from the latter's ability to “see himself as the interviewer saw him.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Lerner interprets the tension between the two characters as an indication of the throes and pangs of modernization. The Grocer is threatening to the interviewer precisely because he is in the midst of passing onto modernity, thereby providing an image of Tosun's own transitional (once, presumably, traditional) past in flesh.

It is noteworthy that Lerner includes a member of the survey team in his array of protagonists inhabiting the “modernizing landscape,” which “involves many Tosuns and shepherds, many grocers and chiefs, many sons of chiefs.”Footnote ⁷⁸ The interviewer emerges as a full-fledged character in this account of the otherwise anonymous landscape, the Grocer and the Chief being the only titles granted to the respondents, with the rest reduced to their number, location, and rural/city distinction on their questionnaires’ front page.Footnote ⁷⁹ In fact, the members of the survey team were asked to attach lengthy descriptions of the respondents at the beginning of the questionnaire forms, and did not hesitate to comment on their physical appearance, education, eating habits, and seeming level of intelligence. At times, such observations gave the interviewers license to skip certain questions, especially if they were acquainted with their subjects beforehand, in one case as a close friend and in another a domestic employee. Some interviewers were flattering—if curiously—in their aesthetic assessments of the respondents: “He reminds me of a dignified silkworm inside his cocoon.” Others were even more ruthless than Tosun: “He always gave me the impression of a jelly-fish, physically.… When he speaks his mouth is wet. When he pronounces his ‘th's, ‘sh's and ‘ch's he spits in the air.”Footnote ⁸⁰

In addition to physical depictions of their respondents, the interviewers frequently recorded what they perceived to be attitudes of fear and intimidation. Some noted that this initial state of trepidation was gradually relaxed once they explained that the project had nothing to do with politics. Yet the survey's motives were so clarified only rarely, and most rural respondents continued to believe that the interviewers came from newspapers, aid agencies, or the government, and that their responses would facilitate the arrival of roads, radios, and movies not unlike those they were being interrogated about. Some suggested that the questionnaire was unlikely to help and that American experts should come and see the situation for themselves, though one thought this had been done before, “with no result.”Footnote ⁸¹

Not only the interviewers communicated their judgments about the survey setting since, once the questionnaires had been filled out, each respondent was asked what they thought about the interview. Though these often detailed answers did not make it into Lerner's reported opinion range or empathy index, they do reveal yet another instance of the unexpected results of the survey setting. Many found the questionnaire “silly,” “lengthy,” “superfluous yet lacking,” and for one it seemed “funny, queer … a most American thing.”Footnote ⁸² Such respondents attempted to meta-pragmatically reframe the survey in both its meanings and context: no longer did it measure progress along an abstract, placeless continuum of modernization; it was, rather, a practice tethered to its place of origin—the United States. Other respondents questioned the lack of transparency intrinsic to the survey setting, and one suggested, “If sincerity is the rule between interviewer and respondent … it would be very interesting for those interviewed to know the results.”Footnote ⁸³ Still others seemed, like the Grocer, highly receptive to and appreciative of the interview process, and suggested that they would have “loved to be able to ask questions too.”Footnote ⁸⁴ The catalogue of reactions to the interview comprises the range of reflective activity unfolding in real-time attitudes toward the discursive interaction. In the case of survey research, both recipients and practitioners negotiated interpretive frames as they tried to make sense of their communicative encounter. That Lerner erased the instances of respondents reframing from his narrative of modernization speaks to his awareness of the necessity to write the script, cast the interviewers, and direct the performance of modern, traditional, and transitional subjectivities in overtly theatrical and staged terms.

In the context of Lerner's seminal work on modernization in the Middle East, the task of the survey is manifold. In his writing, replete with a preoccupation with models, literary imagery, and narrative structures, the imperative to survey is linked as crucially to sight as to cataloguing and numerical reduction. In his account, plot twists, “passings,” and crossroads provide the “landscape” the modernization narrative requires. But although Lerner masterfully performs the task of narrative chronicler, his discerning eye is principally that of the forecaster: “There are villages to which, willy-nilly, the city comes—either via a new concrete road as in Turkey, or via road as in Egypt, or via adventurous young villagers who shuttle to and fro as in Lebanon. By whatever method the city invades the village…. The poignancy is heightened for the modern observer, who knows that in some sense the city will always ‘win,’ by the great human cost added to these dramas because the actors are unaware that a rough draft of the third act is already written.”Footnote ⁸⁵

The surveyor remains the ultimate “modern observer,” at once responsible for delineating the categories that will inform the coding process, and already knowing how the next chapter of modernization will play out. The end-point for this cluster of positive changes is an identifiable destination, since as Lerner famously claimed, the West, and in particular America, is precisely what the “Middle East seeks to become.”Footnote ⁸⁶ In that process, the survey takes on a facilitating task, as evinced by the large-scale sample surveys conducted in Turkey throughout the 1950s and 1960s, which employed qualified versions of Lerner's procedures and his categories of tradition, transition, and modernity.

AN EDUCATION IN TRANSLATION

The two surveys that served as a preamble to this article share a lineage that suggests an affinity in terms both of content and methodology. These and subsequent studies converged in their efforts to set the stage for the performance of modernization, by occasioning the production of proper interviewers who were conceived as modernizing agents. They also relied on earlier criteria laid out by works such as Lerner's, and their translation and adaptation of the original categories nonetheless contributed to the crystallization of modernization theory. As we will see, even growing skepticism towards the political implications of large-scale surveys did not impede the increasing prevalence and popularity of this method in Turkey's social scientific landscape over the following decades.

Frey's survey on high school students, for instance, commenced with a functionalist account of value systems: the prevalence, depth, and the speed of change within these systems were deemed as amenable to measurement by scientific methods as the evolution of biological organisms.Footnote ⁸⁷ He argued elsewhere that the high school students retained “an immoderate amount of authoritarianism,” but their “growing ideological commitment to democratic forms” attested to the crucial role of education in processes of modernization.Footnote ⁸⁸ While his questionnaire was of a reiterative nature, Frey manufactured a new coding system for determining personal achievement categories, which were discerned through notions of future aspirations, assessments of the self and the material world, and conceptions of intellectual and cultural development.Footnote ⁸⁹

Nermin Abadan was more forthcoming in the disclosure of her intellectual predecessors, and her three-fold typology not only mapped onto the three Ankara universities whose students she investigated, but also to those proclaimed by Lerner and Riesman: “The outer-oriented, materialist manager; the idealist, prospective administrative-leader; and the traditional, static implementer.”Footnote ⁹⁰ Abadan, however, chastised the Middle East Technical University students (who fell under Riesman's outer-oriented and Lerner's modern categories) for being too steeped in the Anglo-American tradition: if these students could imagine themselves as the President of Turkey or citizens of another country, this was a testament to their “materialism,” “the influence of the thought patterns of a society that has already tackled its trial of modernization.”Footnote ⁹¹ She insisted that Turkey was, “as Daniel Lerner has correctly pointed out, ‘not yet a modern society by our standards, but is no longer quite traditional either,’” and she did not hesitate to enroll Lerner's categories of attitude formation. Yet her interjections translated, that is, remade the categories by rallying them for purposes beyond their initial intent, at the same time as they contributed to their “routinization” in survey research.Footnote ⁹² While Abadan became renowned for her surveys of Turkish guest workers in West Germany, she remained critical of her earlier study on the spare-time activities of university students, and, in particular, her method of sampling, which, due to lack of funding and assistant personnel, did not entail a process of random selection and thus proceeded in an “incomplete and faulty” manner.Footnote ⁹³

The norms for selecting a representative population by which Abadan appraised her own study came from the lecture notes of a course on social scientific methodology, offered during the 1957–1958 academic year at the Faculty of Political Science at Ankara University, where Abadan taught at the time. That course, which Frederick Frey also attended during his time in Turkey as a Ford Foundation grant recipient, was co-taught by Arif Payaslıoğlu and Herbert Hyman, within the purview of an exchange program between New York University and Ankara University, under the auspices of the International Cooperation Administration (ICA). Though the lecture notes addressed other modes of data collection such as content analysis, the attention devoted to survey design exceeded all other methodological approaches.Footnote ⁹⁴

In many respects, the trajectory of Hyman's career was intertwined with the proliferation of survey methodology in the social scientific circles of the United States. During the war, Hyman participated in the Division of Program Surveys of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the bombing surveys in Germany and Japan, and he later recalled that it was this experience that “led us to train survey researchers and help conduct the first postwar surveys in Japan, Turkey, Norway, and elsewhere against the frequent objections that the method would not work.”Footnote ⁹⁵ While Hyman espoused the superiority of the survey method over data collected through observation, especially given its ability to contribute to the “endeavor to modernize the lives of the people in developing countries,” he cautioned against conducting it on subjects who might be “unwilling or incompetent to provide reliable answers.”Footnote ⁹⁶ Luckily for Hyman, the academic year he spent in Turkey presented two opportunities for conducting surveys on purportedly willing and competent subjects in the university setting, studies that both Abadan and Frey cited profusely.

The first of these works was a comparison between the values of the students of Robert College and the Faculty of Political Sciences at Ankara University, in which the former, not unlike the Middle East Technical University student in Abadan's study, was found to “resemble his American counterpart more than the Ankara student.”Footnote ⁹⁷ Hyman and his collaborators added that most of the university students could be considered modern given the behavioral indices of Lerner's study, but they did not refrain from introducing additional “historical and logical criteria” in their appraisal of Turkey as “presumably partaking both of traditional Middle Eastern culture and of modernized or Westernized culture.”Footnote ⁹⁸ The “historical” criteria allowed the authors to compare the Turkish college youth with both the “traditional” past of Turkey and the “modern” youth in neighboring Europe: “At the level of symbols and practices of daily living, they are clear representatives of modern civilization. This is revealed, for example, in their dress, hygiene, health practices, possessions, and media behavior. Unlike an earlier educated generation, very few can use Arabic.”Footnote ⁹⁹

This blend of modernity and tradition confirmed, for the authors, a reading of Turkey vis-à-vis Lerner's transitional framework. Reverberating across their account were categories of transition espoused in earlier work across the Middle East, the replication of questionnaires conducted on students of the West, and a confirmation of conjectures and motivations that guided survey research in the first place. Hyman and his collaborators emphasized, additionally, the edifying character of their project, seeing as how it was conducted by “a group of Turkish students in the course of receiving training in social research.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Hyman's course on methodology also produced a panel study that relied on two previous surveys targeting the graduates of Ankara University.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Since this method was “new” to Turkey, the academic setting was necessarily its first venue of practice: the students of political science, indeed, the future administrators of Turkey, were designated as simultaneously the subjects and employers of this survey, thereby suggesting its double-fold benefits in terms of both content and training.Footnote ¹⁰² Because the students learned of the sample survey method not only by carrying it out but also by virtue of being interviewed, the meta-methodological concerns of this study would familiarize them with the “realities of survey research,” such as the scarcity of available sources, the need to accomplish certain tasks in a designated time period, and the imperative to cooperate with others in a rational manner.Footnote ¹⁰³

The basis for the trend analysis was a comparison of the occupational patterns of the fathers of the university students, though such questions had not been the primary concern for the previous surveys under examination. The discrepancies in the occupational categories employed by each survey presented yet another educational opportunity for the future survey methodologists. Noting the need for adjustment given these discrepancies, Payaslıoğlu and Frey condensed, combined, and recategorized the answers offered by the students in each survey, thereby providing another instance of the shrinking of particularities under the pretense of recoding. The remaking of recorded categories ostensibly bolstered an analysis of change by discarding problems of incommensurability that otherwise prevailed. As the substantive categories from the earlier surveys were tampered with, indeed flattened out, their modification would abet the survey researchers-in-training in their quest for cycles and regularities. The task of the survey novice was procuring and presenting raw data, and tweaking information, redefining occupational categories, and disposing of irregularities and outliers.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

In 1962 came another opportunity to train “native interviewers” through a large-scale survey targeting a sample of eight thousand rural residents. Christened as the Rural Development Research Project, the survey, mostly funded by USAID, listed a familiar roster of consultants: Daniel Lerner, Herbert Hyman, Ithiel de Sola Pool, and Sloan Wayland, with Frederick Frey acting as the main rapporteur. Frey's various accounts of this project reveal the ways in which survey methodology continued to be fraught with suspicions, alliances, and frailties when undertaken in foreign settings. Given the “sensitive and possibly volatile character of the investigation,” he disclosed, the Turkish State Planning Organization was enlisted as an “official liaison” to assist in “dealing with delicate political situations,” thus “leaving our nascent survey organization generally free to concentrate on the demanding technical tasks of the research.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵

The “technical” and ostensibly apolitical aspects of the survey pertained to the training of native interviewers. They were carefully chosen from among those with rural backgrounds—literate and “reasonably sophisticated” ones—and took a course that included “familiarization with the instruments and sampling plan, lectures and discussions on interviewing techniques, model interviews, role playing, coding practice, and pre-test field work.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Given the strenuous conditions for conducting research in mostly remote villages across Anatolia, supervisors paid regular visits to research sites to further ensure that team leaders abided by norms of randomness in selecting respondents. At the end of this extensive training process Frey could self-assuredly declare, “One of the oft-cited side benefits of the project was that we would bequeath to Turkey a sizable group of well-trained and experienced village interviewers who would be of great use to the government in future work with the peasantry.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ There were unforeseen circumstances though, such as the persistence of an unwritten language (Kurdish) that necessitated the employment of bilingual interviewers, “inevitably sacrificing, thereby, some control over interviewer performance.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Though the USAID reports found it “difficult to eliminate any item as being generally irrelevant” to the “villager's propensity to innovate,” they concluded that the male, literate, young adults with higher degrees of exposure to mass media seemed more likely to be innovative, thus suggesting that those already considered “modern” by the standards of the survey were most likely to modernize.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Further evoking Lerner's tautological standards for psychic mobility and empathy, the capacity for having an “open, imaginative mind,” as well as degrees of “external mistrust”—discerned through interviewer evaluations cataloguing respondents’ suspicion, sincerity and cooperativeness—figured into indices of modernization.Footnote ¹¹⁰ High scores on the innovation index indicated a “relatively flexible cognitive structure”: “Innovators appear to be people … who can project their thoughts and stretch their imaginations, who are not distrustful of strangers coming into the village environment, and who are not restricted by parochial loyalties.”Footnote ¹¹¹ Once again, behavior in the interview setting came to connote exposure to and proclivity for modernization. Openness to a new cultural form (the survey situation), readiness to talk to a stranger (regardless of suspicions that might be validated by disclosure of the agencies involved), and willingness to identify with hypothetical situations were treated as both evidence and raw data. They at once confirmed and factored into the crafting of the categories of modern and traditional.

As social scientific surveys obtained greater visibility in Turkey, the work of Hyman, Abadan, Frey, Payaslıoğlu, and others enlisted the categories proclaimed by Lerner's seminal study at the same time as they introduced caveats to some of its formulations. While the concepts were “transformed in translation,” and thus retained a mutable quality over the course of their travels, they nonetheless aided the popularization of survey methodology.Footnote ¹¹² Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the survey methodology was further spread by a series of novel academic and governmental institutions such as the Institute of Public Administration for Turkey and the Middle East (1952), the State Planning Organization (1960), and the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (1963). The popularization of social scientific surveys came to its fruition by the 1969 elections when the daily newspaper Milliyet commissioned a group of Istanbul University professors to prepare a survey of workers’ voting behaviors. Surveys were so prevalent by 1970 that at a conference about the development of the social sciences in Turkey psychologist Şefik Uysal explained, “When one thinks of social research in our country, the method of data-gathering that comes to mind is the survey.”Footnote ¹¹³