Over-sampling office workers and foremen inflated positive company attitudes in the published study.

Evidence

The more detailed sections of the main report, and the separate volume of tables, showed a somewhat different picture from the one in the published book. Of the 1176 people questioned, 59 were salaried office workers and 110 were foremen, who generally had more positive attitudes to the company than the manual workers, thus significantly exaggerating the `positive’ resultsaccording to which some three-quarters of those questioned had a positive or very positive attitude to the company. Thus 70 per cent of salaried employees, 60 per cent of foremen, but only 45 per cent of workers thought they were adequately paid for their work. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2075

Categorization

• XREF: Classic survey-sampling distortion echoing how the late Frankfurt School’s empirical work mediated its critical findings for publication. — connects to: Including office staff inflated the study’s positive company attitudes — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2075