Polling Consumers: The Rise of Market Research Surveys in Canada, 1929-1941
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Consumer sample surveys, the predecessor of opinion polling, emerged in the late 1920s as a response to the marketing problems of lacklustre demand and inefficient distribution. In conjunction with Dominion Bureau of Statistics marketing data, consumer surveys were conceived and championed as the demandside corollary of rationalised manufacturing methods. By providing quantitative measures of buyer wants and behaviours, they could improve the efficiency and effectiveness of advertising, thus boosting aggregate consumer spending. Chief among the early promoters and practitioners of consumer surveys were advertising agencies, market research firms, and newspaper and magazine publishers. While some US historians of mass marketing have characterised the phenomenon as a democratic leveller of consumption, Canadian consumers, as represented in market surveys, were not a facsimile of the general population. They were disproportionately married and female, urban and English-speaking, and, most of all, drawn from middle-to-upper-income ranks.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.013 | 0.035 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.015 | 0.026 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".