Posted by Racer on January 31, 2004, at 12:06:45
OK, first you have to get the right visual: me pounding my shoe on the table to emphasize my points. (Spock-ette or Nikita, your choice. Long hair, so it covers the pointy ears.)
If you watch poll results, you'll see so many contradictions, and very rarely see that it's because of the way the questions are asked. I heard recently about a question used in voir dire in some trial, where instead of asking the potential jurors what they thought about gun ownership, they asked a more probing question: if you used to own a gun and no longer do, why did you get rid of it? If political polls could do that, I think they'd get better answers. In the case of the woman I spoke with, had the question been along the lines of "What information would you need to know before you could use the following statement as a basis for your decision?" That question might have been helpful.
Oh, and it wasn't fun for either of us. She mumbled, and mumbled so quickly I could barely unstand her, and my aunt was visiting, with a cold, and kept following me around sniffling and coughing, as I tried to find a quiet place to listen. It was just frustrating.
On another occasion, though, I was stopped on the street for a survey about a "New Store" that was planning to open in the area. Survey took about 20 minutes instead of the five they asked for, because the surveyor and I spent so much time talking about social responsibility, Bill Moyers, and the drawbacks to mass marketers like Wal-Mart. She'd never heard about Bill Moyers, so she wanted to know more, which got me into my anti-mass media rant, and my "more funding for non-profits" rant. She thanked me, and wrote more notes on the back of a blank survey form about sources for more information than she did on the form she filled out with my responses. That was a good feeling -- especially since I got the idea that the store that wants to open is a WalMart Supercenter trying to find out what they have to aim their campaign at.
Anyway, back in my younger days, I used to hear the Radical Feminist crowd saying "The Personal *IS* Political" and scoffing. Politics was about logic and rational thought. I no longer believe that quite so strongly. Now I know that the things we experience every day, the lack of resources, the economic damage done to many otherwise valuable individuals by mental illness, the loss to society of so many perceptive and vital minds, and the shameful stigma that allows us all to be discounted, all of these things are a net loss to society, at a time when our society needs all its resources. The personal really is political.
By the way, I've done other sorts of surveys, surveys intended to try to figure out what sort of services a non-profit I was involved in running could offer the community. It's very, very hard to balance the need for some sort of standardization with the need to extract the most useful information. With limited resources, it's impossible to make the survey an in depth interview -- which would give the most complete information -- and compiling the data requires a lot of time even with standardized questions. I have a great deal of respect for anyone who can put together a survey which finds the balance point.
And now, to bring this back to the issue of psychology, that balance point is something I think we're really talking about in some of the other threads on this board that I've joined into. Finding the balance between our fears of expressing emotions that feel as if they'll overwhelm and drown us, and repressing those emotions until they come out through self injury. In the same way, on the social front, there's a great deal of fear that we'll be drowned by the Big Corporations, but punished if we speak out.
(OK, so that was a big stretch. I find political activities liberating and satisfying and therapeutic. Your description of taking surveys just made me want to say something.)
poster:Racer
thread:307707
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20040131/msgs/307707.html