Editorial

This issue of the Journal contains three interesting articlesabout central aspects of public opinion research, as well asan equal number of research notes that reflect the range oftopics that interest all public opinion researchers. Toshio Takeshita takes a turn at reconceptualizing agenda-settingstudies, using a taxonomy     

Editorial

When founding the International Journal of Public Opinion Research,the editors had a vision that the journal would be both internationaland interdisciplinary, while retaining a broad interest in boththeoretical and empirical scholarly work. We included reviews,first of books and then of articles reporting on work in thefield, and then     

Editorial

This issue of the International Journal of Public Opinion Researchonce again takes the reader on a trip around the world. Fourcontinents are looked at, counting the two Americas separately,and data from 19 individual countries feature in the analyses,which pertain to several dozens more. We begin our trip in LatinAmerica. Rodolfo Sarsfield and Fabián Echegaray presentcomparative research covering eight major countries on the continent.One always expects, in comparative studies, large tables thatpresent results     

THE GERMAN REVOLUTION THE HISTORIC EXPERIMENT OF THE DIVISION AND UNIFICATION OF A NATION AS REFLECTED IN SURVEY RESEARCH FINDINGS

Rarely has social research had to meet such a challenge as inobserving the German revolution in the GDR and the unificationof East and West Germany after more than forty years of divisionand life under totalitarian and democratic systems of government.The Institut fur Demoskopie Allensbach, West Germany, foundedin 1947, had the opportunity to conduct representative surveysin the GDR beginning in February 1990 with its own staff ofinterviewers and thus to make comparisons with West German surveyfindings of recent decades on file in the Allensbach Archives.In addition, secret surveys conducted by the Zentralinstitutfur Jugendforschung in Leipzig beginning in 1970 were made available;these too are discussed in the article. The report is basedon 30 surveys in eastern Germany, comprising approximately 32,000interviews conducted up to April 1991; it compares many findingswith results from West Germany as well as from internationalsurveys. It describes the findings for a different kind of socializationand, at the same time, for a German national character heldin common.     

THE PUBLIC AS PROPHET: FINDINGS FROM CONTINUOUS SURVEY RESEARCH AND THEIR IMPORTANCE FOR EARLY DIAGNOSIS OF ECONOMIC GROWTH

Ever since Descartes, the scientific process has been portrayedas including an initial hypothesis, followed by a study of thehypothesis and, finally, by confirmation or refutation of thehypothesis. The following essay illustrates a different scholarlyprocess, familiar especially to natural scientists but now alsogaining ground in the social sciences, as the data availableto empirical social research grows: initially, there is a puzzle,an observation which cannot be explained by familiar scientificrules. This triggers a search for explanations, which, whenthey are successful, result in new knowledge and new theories.The case reported here involves the as yet inexplicable connectionbetween the new year's mood of the German population, as measuredat the end of the old year, and the real growth of the grossnational product in the following year.