The Public Opinion Laboratory, Essay Example

The Public Opinion Laboratory (POL) is a social science research facility. Throughout its history, the POL has struggled with data collection quality control measures. Although data quality was somewhat controlled through statistical methods, the collection methods had no statistically valid way to measure interviewer performance.

Although from an empirical standpoint it was problematic, it became more of an operational issue when it became clear that individual politics were skewing not only data quality but also interviewer advancement opportunities. It so happened that people who shared common interests outside the operational imperatives of the POL began undermining the goal of quality data collection for public policy research. What happened was people who were neither qualified as managers nor interviewers were shown unwarranted privilege. Although so-called spoils systems are common to some extent in any organization, at the POL, it became pervasive enough to threaten the reason the organization even existed. Interviewers who could hardly perform their duties were selected for supervisory and training tasks because they were related to or friendly with certain other people within the organization. What it really amounted to was a lack of leadership integrity on part of the lab manager and her assistant. Neither had experience leading teams toward common goals, and as such, selected people they were friendly with or related to in order to help them manage operations.

In a private organization, this trend would not have seemed so damaging, but because the POL is a government organization dedicated to public policy research, it ruined not only the work for employees and  clients but also for the public at large. Our proposal is for a software suit by which lab monitors could collect performance data on interviewers. Such measures could be automatically validated statistically, which would ensure two things.

1. The best performing interviewers would be selected to train less proficient and newly hired interviewers.
2. The quality of the data collection methods could be externally measured for reliability.

This is important especially with respect to the current scenario. The most deserving employees would be more likely to be rewarded for their efforts, and they could target their collective expertise toward the aims of the organization.