One of my favorite gimmicks used by authors and speakers is to offer up a quotation that appears to be taken from the present day and then reveal – surprise! – that it’s actually from many years in the past. As often as I’ve seen it done, whether the point was to show how political discourse is no less civil now than it was a hundred years ago or that the fabric of society always seems to be unraveling to those living in it, I never tire of being reminded that our current struggles have much in common with those of the past.

So, in that spirit, here’s a quote from an article about the marketing research industry:

“An exploding technology is contributing to the fast pace at which the field of survey research is moving today. Despite this, growing and unresolved problems hamper some of the major accomplishments in this field. Those problems are affecting its growth in the future as well.”

Those words appeared in a 1987 Quirk’s Trade Talk article (“Accomplishments and concerns”) by Beth Hoffman, my editorial predecessor. The focus of her column was a recap of comments made by George Gallup Jr. to an audience of senior marketing executives at a Walker Research-sponsored symposium.

I stumbled across the column while doing a bit of cleanup work on some of the older content in our vast online article archive and was struck by how it was by turns quaint and current.

The “exploding technology” she referred to was the computer, which was rapidly changing the way data could be gathered and processed. Though of course to modern eyes, the phrase could easily apply to the Web or the smartphone.

The basis for the late Gallup Jr.’s talk (he died in 2011) was data from a mail survey (!) of senior marketing executives in which the respondents were asked to comment on the future of survey research. Some of the then-current problems they cited as affecting the industry were: telemarketers posing as interviewers (remember when we were all so worried about sugging?); poorly-designed surveys (still a problem, sadly); fear of being interviewed (!); a lack of understanding of the purposes of survey research (not sure if this has changed or not); opinions will be available only for a price (pretty much true these days, though I’m all for rewarding people for taking time to participate in the research process); and survey respondents, angered over fake surveys or poorly-designed surveys, will demand government regulation (sadly, they probably don’t care enough to complain to the government; they’ll just stop helping us).

Foresaw these threats

Looking to the future, the executives foresaw these threats on the horizon:

Failure to apply sampling guidelines in the surveys. Telephone stations across the country continuing to report surveys based on whomever happens to call in, without any attempt of representativeness. (See: online surveys.)

The widespread danger of government intervention and control of surveys. (Some things never change.)

Respondent reluctance to participate in surveys. Reasons for the climbing refusal rate are various: an overload of surveys; overly long questionnaires, often on dull topics; poor interviewing; invasion of privacy and time pressures are just a few. (Ditto.)

A certain lack of creativity in recent years in developing new research techniques and approaches. (This, I’m happy to note, is not a current problem. There seems to be no shortage of novel and creative research tools on the market today.)

The failure of some polling organizations to indicate the likely outcome of elections. (Still a problem, though as Nate Silver showed in a recap of poll performance after the last Presidential election in his FiveThirtyEight blog, things are getting better. What was the worst-performing poll in Silver’s analysis? Gallup.)