Sheatsley, Paul (1916–1989)

Paul B. Sheatsley was an early leader in the new field of survey research. He was born in New York City in 1916 and received a bachelor's degree from Princeton University in 1936. While following a career in journalism and public relations as editor of the Boonton Tribune in New Jersey (1937–1939) and public relations director for the Yankees' farm team, the Newark International Baseball Club (1939), Sheatsley started working as a part-time interviewer for George Gallup. Gallup then hired him to be field director of the Audience Research Institute (1940–1942). In early 1942, Harry Field, the founder of the recently organized National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Denver, approached his friend and former colleague, Gallup, and asked to “borrow” Sheatsley to head NORC s New York office and direct the important series of studies that NORC was to do for the Office of War Information (1942–1944). Once he had gone to NORC, Sheatsley never left. He headed the New York office until 1963 and directed many major studies, such as the foreign policy series for the U.S. State Department (1945–1957). Then he moved to NORC s headquarters at the University of Chicago to direct its new Survey Research Service. He led that department until 1976 and served as NORC's acting director in 1970–1971. From 1976 until his retirement in 1986, Sheatsley was a senior survey director heading such large-scale projects as the National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey. From 1986 until his death in 1989, he continued as a consultant to NORC.

Sheatsley made major contributions in the areas of survey professionalization, methodology, and substantive analysis. He attended the first conference of survey researchers ever held that was organized by Field in Central City, Colorado, in 1946. This conference led to a second conference in Williamstown, Massachusetts, in 1947 where the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) was organized. Sheatsley became a leader of AAPOR. He served on its council longer than any other person, holding offices in each decade from the 1940s to the 1980s. He was AAPOR president in 1967–1968 and was awarded AAPOR's Exceptionally Distinguished Achievement Award in 1982. He was coeditor with Warren J. Mitofsky of A Meeting Place: The History of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (1992).

While directing many seminal surveys for NORC, Sheatsley conducted a long series of methodological studies to improve data quality. He published articles on such topics as interviewer training, question wording, the use of incentives, validation, and open-versus closed-ended items.

Substantively, Sheatsley did pioneering work in the area of intergroup relations. He was coauthor of a series of four articles published in Scientific American between 1956 and 1978 that has been recognized as the first trend studies on intergroup relations, and he studied the race riots in the 1960s. Another seminal study that he analyzed was the Kennedy Assassination Study in 1963 that measured the public response to the president's murder and served as the baseline for NORC's National Tragedy Study, conducted in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001.

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