Рецензия: Taylor P. (2014) The Next America: Boomers, Millennials and the Looming Generational Showdown (New York: Public Affairs)

Limits of the National Surveys Predictive Capabilities, or, The Future of America

taylor p. (2014) the next america: boomers, millennials and the looming generational showdown, new york: public affairs, 288 p. isbn 9781610393508

Irina Trotsuk
Associate Professor,
Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia
Address: 10/2 Miklukho-Maklaya str., Moscow, Russian Federation 117198
E-mail: irina.trotsuk@yandex.ru

Whether you like it or not, or agree or strongly oppose such an assertion, we all live, or believe to be living in a world constructed from sociological data, mainly from the results of surveys. The beginning of the present era of national representative surveys is primarily associated with the name of George Horace Gallup, an American pioneer of survey sampling techniques, and the inventor of the Gallup poll. There is a quite wellknown fact that in the 1936 presidential elections in the United States, the Literary Digest magazine conducted a poll based on over two million written questionnaires returned by mail which predicted that Alf Landon would be the winner. George Gallup carried out a survey on a random representative sample of a few thousand Americans, and predicted that Franklin Roosevelt would defeat Alf Landon in the U.S. Presidential election. He also predicted that the forecasts of the Literary Digest would be wrong because the results of the magazine’s poll were based on a sample of people who were registered as telephone or car owners, and did not represent all of the voting groups of American society at that time.