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Interviewing Southern Politicians

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

Alexander Heard
Alexander Heard
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina
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Extract

This is a report on the interviews used in preparing Southern Politics in State and Nation. The book, by V. O. Key, Jr., resulted from a study carried on over a three year period at the Bureau of Public Administration of the University of Alabama. Roscoe C. Martin, then director of the Bureau, originated the project, obtained support for it from the Rockefeller Foundation and gave it general supervision.

Mr. Key was assisted by several persons, including this writer. He directed a large share of the project's resources to the task of interviewing participants in southern politics. Forty per cent of the budget was allocated for the salaries and expenses of the two interviewers and for transcribing their reports. Thirty per cent of the time of the senior staff members and twenty per cent of the total time of the whole staff was spent in the field. The decision to devote this large amount of time and money to interviewing rested on the conviction that much significant political information could be obtained only from politicians themselves or from their close associates. It rested also on the belief that accurate observation would eliminate the need for conjecture about many political phenomena.

Type
Research on Political Parties and Leadership
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 44 , Issue 4 , December 1950 , pp. 886 - 896
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1950

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References

1 (New York, 1949.) Eleven states were studied: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia.

2 Donald S. Strong and this writer. The conclusions set forth here grew from the writer's experience in the nine states in which he worked.

3 Most of the political statistics collected for the study, supplemented by additional material, have been published by Heard, Alexander and Strong, Donald S. in Southern Primaries and Elections (University, Alabama, 1950)Google Scholar.

4 Among those interviewed were 11 former governors, 5 United States Senators and former Senators, 16 United States Representatives and former Representatives, 27 managers of statewide political campaigns, 8 state party chairmen, 12 county party chairmen, 9 county and district judges, 56 present and former state legislators, 6 mayors, 8 secretaries of state, 9 prosecuting attorneys, 25 labor leaders (14 CIO, 7 AFL, 4 railroad brother-hoods), 14 farm organization leaders, 14 business organization leaders, 50 “reform” leaders, 21 officials charged with the administration of the poll tax, registration, primaries or elections, 9 publishers, 48 editors, 29 correspondents and columnists, 48 educators, 40 Negro leaders, and 26 Republican leaders. There was a visit to the office of all secretaries of state and to other offices to obtain statistical and legal data, as well as attendance at miscellaneous gatherings such as party rallies, “speakings,” a KKK meeting, an ADA meeting, and a Negro political rally.

5 Research assistants prepared abstracts of legal regulations and party rules as well as statistical calculations. The correlations were designed to show any social or economio bases of a candidate's strength, any similarities in the distribution of his strength from one race to another, any similarities to the strength of other politicians, and so forth.

6 Studies by public opinion research organizations indicate that the validity of interview results is affected by the personal views of the interviewers and by discrepancies in race or class between interviewers and respondents. Sources of distortion are at least two: in the selection of persons for interview and in the differences in rapport established between the interviewer and his informants. The type of interviewing being discussed here differs from public opinion sampling, but the opportunities for bias are obvious. This is especially true when all interviews are conducted by one or two individuals rather than by a battery of persons whose biases may in some ways offset each other. See Cantril, Hadley, Gauging Public Opinion (Princeton, 1944)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Ch. 8, and Williams, Frederick and Cantril, Hadley, “The Use of Interviewer Rapport as a Method of Detecting Differences Between ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ Opinion,” The Journal of Social Psychology, Vol. 22, pp. 171–75 (1945)CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

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