Search for a command to run...
The results of mass public opinion surveys, both foreign and our own, are most often used to obtain information about real or potential reactions of people to certain events, to changes in the economic, political, and cultural situation, and to the actions of political leaders or the mass media. However, the potential of surveys as an instrument of social knowledge is not limited to this. Under certain conditions—the presence of meaningful conceptions, repeated and comparable investigations—the data of mass surveys—can be used as a means to study more stable and latent factors of social life such as sociopsychological attitudes, social norms, and sociocultural values. Factors on these different levels are interrelated, and hence the results of a particular investigation usually reflect complex phenomena that analysis can break down into discrete parts. For example, approval or nonapproval of some actions of the authorities, satisfaction or dissatisfaction with living conditions or work conditions, etc., are all indices of the composite effects of orientations and attitudes, of the direct responses and perceptual stereotypes provided by the mass media, and so on.