Summer 2022      Volume 50, Number 3

The “Bates Shop”: Fishing for Primary Source Documents: Public Opinion Polls
in the Classroom
By David Bates

Document: Column 

Introductory Paragraph:  Opinion polls are primary sources—the “raw materials of history” as the Library of Congress defines them (Getting Started . . ., n.d.). Like other primary sources—photographs, audio/visual recordings, physical artifacts, digital files and websites, and so much more—opinion polls offer a direct link to the past. But they also differ from those more familiar sources in two key ways. First, while most primary sources express the opinion of a single author or creator, opinion polls reflect the opinions of many thousands of people. This offers students a wider point of entry to the past than a single source, forcing them to seek context that goes beyond the individual and encompasses whole groups of Americans. Second, unlike other sources, opinion polls practically demand an analysis of their creation and design. Studying the Depression-era “Migrant Mother” photo will not necessarily lead to an exploration of the history of photographic technique, and few teachers will have the time or inclination to do so. But to gain even a basic understanding of opinion polls, students will need to consider the psychological and sociological implications of study design, the statistical work of coding and interpreting data, and the design work to distill the numbers into visualizations. In short, using opinion polls in the classroom is an enormous amount of work, but it can also offer enormous payoffs. Here, I will offer a few brief examples of historical opinion polls that might stimulate student inquiry, and then offer some suggestions for working with such sources in the classroom.

DOI:  https://doi.org/10.33600/IRCJ.50.3.2022.70

Page Numbers:   70-75