Presidential Address CAVEAT VENDITOR: SOME OBSERVATIONS ON RESEARCH SPONSORS AND PROFESSIONAL STANDARDS

In case anyone saw an inteTesting-sounding title to my talk in the printed program, I should announce a change. The new title is "Caveat Venditor," let the seller beware. Having found a title, let me try to set a tone. My text is taken from an editorial in the Winter, 1944, Public Opinion Quarterly, the opening line of which reads: "For the first time, public opinion polls are the subject of serious and widespread criticism." Then, six lines later, the editor identified the focus of the criticism with the question: "Do all of the polls want to get accurate results and interpret them fairly all of the time?" It is comforting that some questions can persist so long in the midst of so much change. Ever since its establishment, AAPOR has given more than perfunctory attention to ethical matters. At its very first meeting in 1947, a Committee on Standards was proposed. The Committee was established the next year and has continued ever since. By i960 we had our written code. Parallel developments were taking place in other fields during the same period. The psychologists adopted their first code, "Ethical Standards of Psychologists," in 1953 (sixty years after the establishment of the Association) and have revised it four times since. The American Sociological Association has been trying hard since about 1956 to decide on generally acceptable principles, and finally, just this year, its members have approved a Code of Ethics. The anthropologists, or more precisely the Fellows of the American Anthropological Association, issued in 1967 a "Statement of Problems of Anthropological Research and Ethics," somewhat hortatory in tone, urging anthropologists and their sponsors to consider a set of ethical prin-