ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the Wartime Social Survey, an official opinion polling agency set up in Britain at the outset of the Second World War. Charting the origins of this agency and its approach to monitoring and measuring opinion, it advances two main arguments: that the Survey's method of “sampling” the public rationalised and codified persuasion in ways that gave an illusion of a “science” of influence and that this “science” was driven by a fixation with media tactics the apparent effects of which could be used to inform subsequent media strategies. The Survey, I contend, did not actually explore strategy – defined here as the overarching approach that an individual or institution takes to persuading people – but did isolate specific means of persuasion in an attempt to map their effects. How it managed this and what larger lessons can be learned from its work represent key concerns of this chapter, which concludes with a discussion of the utility of polling to studies of media influence.
