Stories Archives

Survey scientist dials into public opinion

By Melea Reicks Licht

Don’t hang up the phone just yet. 

That person on the other end of the line asking you to answer a few questions may have your community’s best interests in mind – just like Don Dillman, ISU alum and pioneer of telephone, mail and Internet survey methodology.

Dillman believes surveys are essential tools in community development. 

“The sample survey is an enormously useful tool in rural communities,” Dillman says. “In rural America there are fewer and fewer data sets. Sample surveys provide community leaders and policy makers the information they need to encourage successful development.”

Dillman is a Regents Professor and the Thomas S. Foley Distinguished Professor of Government and Public Policy in the Economic Sciences Research Center in the Department of Sociology and Community and Rural Sociology at Washington State University. 

Asking Dillman to choose his favorite survey method is like asking him which child he loves more.

Even in this day and age of information technology, he says telephone and mail surveys are still preferable for certain situations, as are Web surveys. 

“Each mode has its strengths and weaknesses. One has to understand them all and tailor the mode and design to each situation,” Dillman says. “That’s why I refer to this as the ‘Mixed Mode Era.’”

Dillman entered ISU as an agronomy major in 1959, but after an introductory sociology course and six months in Poland with The International Farm Youth Exchange, he discovered he was fascinated with human behavior. Sociology faculty encouraged him to pursue his graduate education and he eventually earned three degrees from Iowa State – a bachelors’ in agronomy in 1964, a master’s in .rural sociology in 1966 and a doctorate in sociology in 1969.

Dillman performed his first telephone survey while working in “The Shop” in the ISU sociology department. Dillman says that was among the first telephone public opinion surveys ever conducted. 

“George Beal asked us to do a telephone survey to find out why an Ames bond issue was defeated,” Dillman says. “At the time there were only maybe four peer-reviewed articles on that type of research. Today there are over 4,000. For us in The Shop, this wasn’t any different from picking up other new methodologies and technologies and trying to make them work.”

Conducting that one telephone survey made Dillman the most experienced at conducting telephone surveys on the Washington State University campus when he arrived as an assistant professor in 1969. He became the founding coordinator of the University’s Public Opinion Laboratory, one of the first in the world to rely on telephone methods.

He later served as director of the university’s Social and Economic Research Center and chair of the Department of Rural Sociology. Dillman also worked as the senior survey methodologist at the U.S. Census Bureau, where he provided leadership for redesigning data collection procedures used in the 2000 Census.

Dillman’s research and work in policy development have made him an internationally cited expert in the area of mail, telephone and Internet survey methodology. In fact, he wrote the book on the subject, as well as a few others, and plans to release the third edition next year under the title Web, Paper and Mixed-Mode Surveys.

“The Shop”
Don Dillman received his graduate training in what was affectionately called “The Shop,” a term that referred to the cadre of graduate students supervised by George Beal and Joe Bohlen from approximately 1955-1980 in the Department of Sociology. Shop members included Gerald Klonglan and Richard Warren who carried on The Shop with their own graduate students after they became faculty along with Charles Mulford. Everett Rogers, Ron Powers, Daryl Hobbs, Larry Kasperbauer, Quentin Jenkins and Rex Warland are just a few of the sociology notables educated in The Shop.