Stuart C. Dodd

Stuart Carter Dodd (1900-1975) was an American sociologist and an educator, who published research on the Middle East and on mathematical sociology, and was a pioneer in scientific polling.

Stuart C. Dodd was born in 1900 in Talas, Turkey. His father was a medical missionary there. He graduated from Princeton University in 1926 with a degree in psychology. He began his career as professor of Sociology and Director of the Social Science Research Section of the American University of Beirut. During World War II, Dodd directed opinion survey work for the Allied Expeditionary Forces in Sicily and the Near East.

After the war in 1947, Dodd was appointed Professor of Sociology at the University of Washington and director of the newly created Public Opinion Laboratory, the precursor for the Institute For Sociological Research at the University of Washington, where he remained until 1961. End 1950s he was among the first members of the Society for General Systems Research. He further served on the board of the Forum Foundations, which conducted futures research in the field of Administrative Theory and Many-to-Many Communication technology.

He was a Fellow of the National Research Council and the Rockefeller Foundation.

Dodd was a leading expert on typical statistical polling as head of the Washington State Public Opinion Laboratory at the University of Washington in the 1960s. He was the only pollster to accurately predict, that U.S. President Harry S. Truman would defeat Governor Thomas E. Dewey and was called to testify before Congress as to how that all happened.

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