Social Research and Market Research: A Reply to Harrop and Abrams

Abstract

I endorse this statement without reservation. My only regret is that what I wrote could be interpreted as an attack on survey research per se , which manifestly must be a valid criticism of my work as both Harrop and Abrams take me to task for this. Quite the reverse was intended. Contrary to appearances, I believe that all three of us are united on three points: first, that survey research is a valuable methodological tool for the sociologist; second, that technical standards of survey research among sociologists are presently poor; and third, that steps need urgently to be taken to improve the quality of sociological survey research. Given such fundamental agreement, how is it that the three of us can be so much at odds? The answer, I think, may be in the origin of my piece. Towards the end of 1975, Cathie Marsh (then at the SSRC Survey Unit) invited my comments on the draft for the revised edition of the SSRC's Guidelines in Commissioning Research from a Research Company. In writing at some length to her, I realized that I had produced the basis for a research note which raised wider issues and which might therefore be of interest to a wider audience as it has proved. It was accepted for publication in Sociology by the summer of 1976, even though it did not appear until three years later. This may explain why it refers to the now defunct SSRC Survey Unit, and why Harrop and particularly Abrams see it as an attack on the Unit and its task of improving survey research. I thought I was writing about a specific technical issue (the use of market research in surveys), and I should make it clear that my target was an SSRC policy, not the Survey Unit, not the Director of the Unit, nor even as I saw it a Unit policy. One problem of commenting on an amorphous organization like SSRC is, as I have found in the past, that the wrong people often feel themselves to be the objects of criticism. I can therefore sympathize with Dr. Abrams' evident sense of personal grievance, but I cannot allow his inaccurate and ad hominem comments to pass unanswered. To start with, he devotes the first part of his note to demolishing my case that there was an SSRC conspiracy to suppress methodological pluralism in favour of survey research. Unfortunately, nowhere in my paper did I actually make that case, and indeed, I argue the exact opposite! I explicitly challenge the complaint that SSRC was only interested in survey research, saying that the criticism was always somewhat unfair, and there have been ample signs of methodological pluralism, most notably in the last few years, (p. 308) Nor did I say that the purpose of the Survey Unit's publications was 'to steer the researcher towards market research'. What I said was that 'the effect of the two publications is to steer the researcher towards market research'. There is a world of difference between the purpose of something and its effect: whatever my personal suspicions, I was not centrally concerned with attributing motive or intention to the staff of the Survey Unit, but rather, in a somewhat Mertonian fashion, I was dealing with the consequences of their actions. Had Dr. Abrams quoted me in full, the meaning would have been clear to the reader (and to himself).