themes of therse letters are: complaints about the suppression and distortion of news by the Soviet media, manifestations of desires to be adequately informed about the world, and compliments to Radio Liberty for its interesting and informative broadcasting.

While this content shows little change over time, the flow of these letters has shown a decrease in volume during recent months. Although it might merely be taken as a sign of loss of interest, this simple interpretation would ignore certain facts. Recently the foreign mail has undergone stricter censorship and strong anti-Radio Liberty campaigns have been launched. That the Soviet government has taken an increased interest in Radio Liberty is shown by the . . . yearly breakdown of the volume of media used in attacking Radio Liberty.

PANEL EVALUATION OF RL PROGRAMS

As a partial substitute for first-hand audience feedback, Radio Liberty has developed a panel approach for program evaluation. A fairly sizable panel is formed of recent emigrants, travelers, and Soviet experts. The members of these panels receive samples of the new program items, and they are asked to evaluate them in terms of the effects they might have on Soviet audiences. To facilitate and systematize this evaluation, a variety of specific questions are asked: How interesting is its content? How effective will it be? How is the form of presentation, language, style? Is the program sufficiently supported by facts and data? Should the program be repeatedly used? Does the program appeal to the whole listenership? to the creative intelligentsia? to the scientific-technical intelligentsia? to journalists? to party and ideological leadership? to military, youth, workers, rural populations? The members of the panel evaluate each submitted program element in the above terms. Then the evaluations produced by individual members are summarized and the conclusions are formulated.

Considering the situational constraints, the above panel procedure appears to provide an economical solution. The panel's effectiveness, of course, depends a great deal on the authenticity of its members in their representation of the contemporary Soviet audiences-their concerns, attitudes, language, style, taste, etc.

REPORTS ON INTERVIEWS

To differentiate this method from the RFE's public opinion questions, which are contained in a questionnaire administered in a uniform, schematic procedure called an "interview," Radio Liberty refers to its approach as "conversations." These are also fundamentally interviews, but they differ from RFE's surveys in that they are not organized on the same lines as Western surveys. They try to adapt to each individual informant and tap his personal knowledge and opinions in the framework of one or more conversations. The interviewer is not bound by prepared questions but has a checklist of possible topics. These involve general

listening, foreign radio listening, general accounts of audience reactions, attitudes, opinions, etc. The conversation can be of any length, extend over numerous meetings, and can discuss audience characteristics at any depth. This procedure does not follow the rationale of Western opinion surveys, which attempt to work with representative samples by using a standard, pretested set of uniform questions. Accordingly, RL's evaluation is fundamentally descriptive.

The number of persons interviewed reaches several hundred yearly. Thus, the size of the group is large enough to warrant broader generalizations. The specific composition of these samples, however, represents the more thorny problem.

Radio Liberty's position, as it stands now, is that in order to protect informants, it would be "irresponsible" to place the interview in the public spotlight. As a "Note" by Radio Liberty on this subject states:

The difficulties encountered in conducting survey research work among Soviet citizens are all those obstacles which a totalitarian regime can systematically impose, the most important of which is the denial of free and ready access to interviewees, both within and without the territorial confines of the USSR. Internally, the Soviet Union is a closed society and systematic interviewing of a representative sample of the population is impossible for obvious reasons. This limits Audience Research essentially to interviewing Soviet travelers abroad. Here also free access is denied, however. Travelers abroad are generally briefed to be wary of foreigners or Soviet emigres who attempt to engage them in conversation on substantive issues. Surveillance of Soviet travelers, while not total, is also a common practice. Additionally, fear plays an important role. Radio Liberty and other foreign radios are regularly and systematically attacked by Soviet media in the most inflammatory terms. The virulent hostility of the Soviet regime to foreign radios in general and Radio Liberty in particular is consequently no secret to Soviet citizens and they are often hesitant to discuss listening (which can be interpreted as a political act) with a stranger until good rapport and some degree of confidence can be established, often a time-consuming process. In light of these impediments to normal social research, usual scientific sampling methods are precluded. An adjunct to the above is that the recruitment and training of qualified people to work as field interviewers is no easy task.

As an additional reason for keeping these interviews confidential, Radio Liberty refers to the need to protect the RL interviewer. This attitude of cautious secrecy prevails in the entire procedure from the moment of contact to the use of the results.

In respect to the contact, no claim is made for random choice. To the contrary, those travelers are interviewed who in a careful process of establishing rapport present themselves as cooperative. Areas of conversation or themes about which the interviewee appears hesitant to speak are avoided. The broadcasting divisions receive the report of the conversations in an anonymous form.

The main products that the broadcasting divisions receive are in the form of single listener reports. They describe the interviewee in terms of occupation, nationality, and language. The reports also include such details as place, listening times, language of broadcast, audibility, jamming, and specific programs listened to. In addition to these general, largely technical details, there is a summary of the conversation, which may include statements about public reactions, comments on recent events, and expectations about future developments. In the few reports I have read, there was a recurring complaint about the system's control of news and the general lack of reliable, objective information.

NOTES

1. Alex Inkeles and Raymond Bauer, The Soviet Citizen (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961).

2. This opinion is generally supported by the literature. As Inkeles and Bauer point out in their Harvard study on Soviet refugees, “there are many excellent books describing the history of the Soviet Union and the formal structure and functioning of its institutions, but we know almost nothing about the attitudes, values, and experiences of its citizens." The Soviet Citizen (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959), p. 3.

IDENTIFICATION WITH NORTH OR SOUTH VIETNAM
IN EASTERN EUROPE*

BY RADIO FREE EUROPE

An example of the use of comparative and continual sampling techniques by RFE to assess east European dispositions toward North and South Vietnam.

Interviewing on which this report is based was completed in 1967. Six hundred and seven (607) Polish, 622 Hungarian and 279 Czech and Slovak respondents were polled. Urban residents and those in the higher occupational and educational brackets were overrepresented. The method of COMPARATIVE AND CONTINUAL SAMPLING was employed, and the final analysis was based on those findings which were to a large extent common to the independent samples obtained in seven interviewing areas over a period of 11 months. The interviews were carried out by local opinion research institutes whose interviewers were not identified with Radio Free Europe.

I. WHICH SIDE SHOULD BE SUPPORTED BY YOUR COUNTRY? Table 1, shows the amount of support North Vietnam and South Vietnam received from the Polish, Hungarian and Czechoslovak samples. The question was formulated so as to neutralize, as much as possible, the fact that the citizens of none of the three countries have, at present, any choice about supporting North Vietnam:

*Excerpts from "Identification With North or South Vietnam in Eastern Europe," Audience and Public Opinion Research Department, Radio Free Europe, April 1968.

Table 1

"Assuming that it had a free hand in the matter, should your country support North Vietnam, South Vietnam or neither?"

In spite of strenuous propaganda efforts, the Polish, Hungarian and Czechoslovak governments have not succeeded in evoking a groundswell of sympathy for the North Vietnamese "victims of imperialist aggression." Fully 82% of the Poles, 86% of the Hungarians and 91% of the Czechs/Slovaks polled did not want their country to support North Viet

nam.

Support for South Vietnam was slightly stronger. The pro-South Vietnamese minorities in the Polish and Hungarian samples were only marginally larger than the pro-North Vietnamese minorities. However, among the Czechs and Slovaks, South Vietnam was clearly favored over the Communist North: even so, only one in seven respondents from Czechoslovakia wished to see his country become involved on the side of Saigon.

Not to take sides at all was the reaction of two out of three Poles and three out of four Hungarians and Czechs/Slovaks interviewed. To all indications, most Poles, Hungarians and Czechs/Slovaks interviewed are not ready to take sides in the Vietnamese war and desire that their countries should be equally uncommited in this distant conflict.

II. WHAT KIND OF HELP SHOULD BE GIVEN TO NORTH AND SOUTH VIETNAM?

Humanitarian and material aid were suggested most frequently, while military support was mentioned by only about a quarter of the pro-North Vietnamese minorities. Moral and diplomatic support, which calls for little sacrifice on the giver's part, was suggested mainly by Hungarians:

Table 2

"What kind of help should your country give to North Vietnam?”

Depite the vast deployment of American aid in South Vietnam, a very large proportion of Czechs and Slovaks, a majority of Poles and nearly half the Hungarians wanted their country to give humanitarian relief and economic aid to South Vietnam. In this respect, East European respondents appear to see both Vietnams in the same light: distant and non-white North and South seem to be associated with disease, poverty and backwardness. In the Hungarian and Polish subsamples, military support was specified by only one respondent in six; the Czechs and Slovaks not only identified more with South Vietnam than with North Vietnam (see Table 1), but they also wanted to help them militarily twice as often as did the Poles and Hungarians.

III. REASONS FOR NOT TAKING SIDES

In Table 1 it was shown that large majorities from Poland, Hungary and Czechosovakia wanted their country to stay clear of the Vietnam conflict; this desire for non-involvement was based on the following

reasons:

Table 3

"Why should your country support neither North Vietnam nor South Vietnam?"

As Table 3 shows, the plurality of Poles and Hungarians-and a large minority of the Czechs and Slovaks-felt that their country lacked the means to influence events in Vietnam. Conceptually related is the view that Vietnam is far away and (hence) of no concern to the respondent's country.