well, I'm biased. :) But yeah, I've found this in my own research. When I was doing preliminary fieldwork on laid off factory workers going through a retraining program, most attending a local community college, people were approaching me to interview them about their experience as civilians who'd been booted off the DoD teat when they shut down military bases. They were pissed! You aren't supposed to lose a job with the government! I'd be sitting in the cafeteria, talking with someone from the factory, and I couldn't finish because a group would eventually gather around, wanting to have a discussion about their experiences.
Later, when I'd moved on to research on managers and professionals, I mentioned the research in a class I was teaching. A student's father called, inviting me inside a subsidiary of AT&T so I could study how upper-level mgmt felt--mostly pissed about the downsizings--which they saw as the result of crappy CEO decision-making. Anyone who "researches up" knows how difficult it is to get inside a company like that. Unfortunately, my father's illness meant I had to relocate and lost my 'in' at that company.
I also concur with Burkholder's point that people who've rarely been asked what they think (here in the u.s.) will welcome a researcher. I'm too lazy to pull out all the interviews, but here's a response I have handy:
Both Andrea and Gail see their political involvement as a way to exert some control over political decision-making. They are adamant that there needs to be some way to make the voices of citizens heard as well as heeded. Still, they lack a language with which to express their nascent recognition that decisions made in corporate boardrooms affect their fate just as much as those made by politicians. Still, the most poignant moments of our conversations occurred when these women discussed the importance of public dialogue and engagement. Andrea, for example, maintains that public dialogue is a fundamental component of human life:
"It seems important to have some sort of dialogue. Otherwise, you just sit at home and shake your fist at the t.v. When you talk there's this feeling that we are, you know, acknowledging one another. I'm allowed to speak 'cause someone else thinks I should, even if they don't agree with me. A human being that is led to believe that they make no difference, their existence means nothing. Having someone listen, respond, and argue with you makes your existence meaningful."
The eloquence of Andrea's plea for a forum within which people might engage in public dialogue stands in sharp contrast to the claims of a cadre of experts who ritually rebuke the working-class for their apathy. <...>
That said, polling/ethnography/etc. etc. were and are used as ways to subjugate populations as part of a nationalizing process. It's a double-edged sword. But this isn't really news to anyone who has a healthy understanding of the history of the social sciences and their ambivalent relation to the state, imperializing or nationlizing (which are two parts of the same process....).
Kelley