George Horace Gallup (November 18, 1901 - July 26, 1984), American statistician, invented the Gallup poll, a successful statistical method of survey sampling for measuring public opinion.

Gallup was born into a poor farming family in Jefferson, Iowa. He entered State University of Iowa in 1918, and earned a B. A. (1923), M. A. (1925), and Ph. D. (1928) there; his doctoral dissertation was entitled A New Technique for Objective Methods for Measuring Reader Interest in Newspapers. After teaching at Iowa, he left in 1929 to head the school of journalism at Drake University, leaving there in 1931 to teach and do research at Northwestern University. One year later he joined Young & Rubicam (Y&R), an advertising agency, where he conducted public opinion surveys for its clients and became that industry's first market research director. He remained with Y&R for sixteen years. While still at Y&R, he founded the American Institute of Public Opinion in 1935.

In 1936 his new organization achieved national recognition by correctly predicting, from the replies of only 50,000 respondents, the result of that year's presidential election, in contradiction to the widely respected Literary Digest magazine whose much more extensive poll based on over two million returned questionnaires got the result wrong. Not only did he get the election right, he correctly predicted the results of the Literary Digest poll as well using a random sample smaller than theirs but chosen to match it.

Twelve years later his organization had its moment of greatest ignominy, when it predicted that Thomas Dewey would defeat Harry Truman in the 1948 election, by from five to 15 percentage points. Gallup believed the error was mostly due to ending his polling three weeks before Election Day.

In 1958 Gallup grouped all of his polling operations under what became The Gallup Organization .

Gallup died of a heart attack at his summer home in Tschingel , a village in the Bernese Oberland of Switzerland. Four years after his death, The Gallup Organization was sold to the Selection Research Institute in Lincoln, Nebraska.

Today, the George H. Gallup International Institute is headed by Gallup's son.

Books

• Guide to Public Opinion Polls (1944)

External links

• Famous Iowans: George Gallup, from the Des Moines Register website
• George Gallup from a University of Texas website