Strong Arguments and Weak Evidence: The Open/Closed Questioning Controversy of the 1940s
Public Opinion Quarterly, 48 (1):
267--282 (1984)Abstract
The debate on open/closed survey questioning and interviewing took shape in an organizational competition between groups of commercial and academic researchers working in the federal government during World War II. The controversy hardened differences between pollsters and certain academic social scientists without bringing experimental evidence to bear on the issues. Open questioning has yielded over the years to the dominance of closed questioning, in response to in-house experience with questions and the relentless rise in survey costs, not from methodological research of any scope. The questioning controversy, shaped in good part by ideologies about research, has remained largely untouched by research.