Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> Carrol Cox wrote:
>
> >Door-to-door "polling" can be used (and was used by some J.O.I.N. locals
> >in the mid-60s) as an organizing technique. The questionnaire can be
> >designed to lead people to think about topics that they had never
> >focused on before, and of course (as you point out here)the questions
> >can be designed both to provide information _and_ to pose hypothetical
> >situations.
>
> That's a version of what's known in the trade as a push poll, most
> commonly used in political campaigns. A rep of Candidate X calls up,
> posing as a pollster, asking: "How would you feel if you heard that
> Candidate Y likes to have sex with dogs?" Well not exactly that
> question, but you get the idea.
>
The two overlap, but there are fundamental differences, beginning with the fact that the kind of "poll" I am speaking of _cannot be done over the phone_ but must be done personally, but the organizer, in direct & protracted conversation. The key is not the mere answers the respondent gives but in the give-and-take dynamic that develops among those in the conversation. (The conversation always involves at least three persons, since the "interviewer" should be a pair, not a single person. In the kind of poll you describe everything is done with as soon as the polled person gives his/her answer. In the kind of interview I am describing, the conversation over the questionnaire is a beginning, not an end. If the interviewer never sees the interviewee again, then (in my terms) nothing has happened; the interview for practical purposes didn't even occur.
We are talking about one moment in a protracted process of building the local base of a mass national movement.
Carrol