DATA BANKS AND DEPOSITORIES- ridicule resulting by the silliness, inconsis-
tency, and imprecision of the questions,
and thus answers biased by contempt; - heaps of paper uselessly encumbering
archives, if the government mistrust them,
or very serious mistakes if it uses them,
not to speak of the time stolen from
the municipal or provincial administrators
who must prepare the answers.’’ (Gioja
1852, p. 5)
A powerful answer to these problems came
from the development of survey research, particu-
larly from the 1940s on by American sociologists
who developed the ‘‘art of asking why’’; namely the
inquiry into the rational motivations of individual
behavior. It is not surprising that these new meth-
ods originally developed in two crucial areas of
behavior: the choice of candidates in an electoral
process, and the choice of a product in consump-
tion behavior. There has been much criticism of
mercantile attitudes in voting, and of course it is
quite clear that some of the value motivations that
are mobilized in choosing a candidate are evident-
ly not the same as those that are mobilized in
picking up one granola package rather than anoth-
er from a shelf. But the critics miss the point. The
two areas of behavior are similar, and the inquiry
into behavioral motivations should not be divert-
ed by undue considerations of political or ethical
correctness. Little wonder that scholars had to
develop new data collection tools on this type of
behavior. And equally not surprising is that politi-
cal and economic elites are willing to invest re-
sources in the arduous enterprise of predicting the
aggregate outcome of individual behavior. A pru-
dent politician today constantly monitors the opin-
ion of the electorate. And economists make use
not only of large-scale models of the behavior of
macroeconomic systems, but also of assessments
of consumer behavior. Politicians, bureaucrats,
entrepreneurs, and managers would have a hard
time doing without the tools provided by the social
sciences.
Survey data collection methods, however, pre-
sented the social scientist and his institutions with
novel problems. Pollsters and survey people in
general produce huge quantities of individually
uninteresting questionnaires. Punched cards were
developed to hold data; at first the cards were
processed manually as the ‘‘McBee cards,’’ but
soon after machine-readable cards were devel-
oped, such as those punched with the Hollerith
code (universally known as IBM card). Cards were
easier to store than questionnaires, but it was easy,
in a routine research process, to lose the ‘‘codebook’’
of the research so that in many cases the cards
were useless, even if they contained relevant infor-
mation (Rokkan 1976). Thus the storing, han-
dling, processing, and redistributing of punched
cards required specific skills. Furthermore, the
traditional institutional structure of universities
and research centers is not well adapted to take on
these tasks. Originally social scientists turned to
libraries to store their data (Lucci and Rokkan
1957), but in the late 1950s and early 1960s librar-
ies were not equipped to handle large masses of
data requiring mainframe computers. The big ma-
chines were housed in separate structures and
tended by IBM technicians. Social scientists had
limited access to the mainframe computers and
therefore, the data, until the scientists developed
their own separate institutions on the model of the
Inter University Consortium for Political Research
at Ann Arbor, Michigan (ICPR, later turned into
ICPSR when social research was added). In Eu-
rope the vision and farsightedness of scholars such
as Philip Abrams in the United Kingdom, Stein
Rokkan in Norway, and Erwin Scheuch in Germa-
ny, helped establish the first archives in Essex, the
Social Science Research Center, in Bergen, the
Norwegian Data Service, and in Koeln, the
Zentralarchiv fur Empirische Sozialforschung. Later
on these archives developed their own organiza-
tions, first IFDO, International Federation of Data
Organizations, and later on CESSDA, Council of
European Social Science Data Archives. Archives
developed in Italy at the Istituto Superiore di
Sociologia of Milano (ADPSS), in Denmark (DDA),
in the Netherlands (the Steinmetz archive), in
Belgium (BASS), and in France (BDSP in Greno-
ble and in several other places).SOCIAL SCIENCE DATA ARCHIVESCultural and technological changes led to the
creation of Social Science Data Archives (SSDA).
SSDA are scientific institutions that retrieve, store,
and distribute large amounts of data on social
science. The oldest and the most important SSDA
were established in the United States—where an
emphasis on quantitative social research is deeply
rooted—when there was growing attention by both