Excuse me - I'm Carrying Out a Survey

We either packed it in during training or stuck the job for years. I did six.

Gillyanne, of The Gallup Organisation showed us how to stop the punters in the street, flash our ID from the Market Research Society in their faces and rattle through the scripted questions, learning to keep our voice neutral and matter of fact no matter how strange the questions or the answers. We first had to ask people their age and the occupation of the chief income earner of the house. This was serious stuff as we had to get our quota right, so many 16-25s, so many 65+, our socio-economic groups AB, C2 DE etc, what mattered was to get a precise spread. I had a grey handbook with all the categories to refer to if I was unsure. My ten 'respondents' would be counted into the thousand across the UK as the key indicator of what the world and its wife thought and wanted.

I was a socio DE. I was working on top of the dole. I got less child allowance for the younger one and it was foolish to stay at home and go without when there was a good nursery close by and I would keep half my money after I paid the fees. The littl'un was not yet one so a one day a week job suited me fine. It also paid better than cleaning.

My friend Louise, another single mum who I had known for years through the mental health scene had her doubts.

'Are you, er allowed to do this?' she asked in her whispery little voice.

'Oh yes' I said 'it's a new system.'

The Scots are nice. It was obvious that I was working illegally. I was stopping Jo Public outside Morrisons  in Dalry Road, a busy main street ten minutes away from my  flat! Yet even the old grumps on my landing who never spoke to me, kept quiet and did not shop me to the dole.

OUT ON THE STREET

My first unexpected answer.

It was an open-ended question. We had to ask about chemist's merchandise.

'And what products would you expect to see on the shelves of Boots the chemists?'

The old man did not hesitate.

'Contraceptives!'

The Gallup questionnaire was an 'omnibus survey'. Various companies paid for the inclusion of a short question or two and the script veered from topic to topic like a rackety old tram . When there was an abrupt jump in subject, before moving on I had to read out -

'And now for something completely different'

So this was where Monty Python got their catchphrase. Did one of the team once work for Gallup?

LAID OFF DUE TO DEVIOUS TORIES

In February 1997 the Gallup Organisation closed. The Tories had killed us. It's true, it was on TV.

The first question on our survey was always -

'If there was a general election tomorrow who would you vote for?'

Last time round Gallup had predicted a Labour landslide. They were, we went on to learn on the first of  May that year, five years out but now, with a fresh election coming up, no one wanted to study our mistakes. What had skewed the 1992 survey was that Labour, SNP and the smaller parties had voters who named their party. There were also two additional options 'don't know' and 'refuse'. A disproportionate number of Tory voters refused to reply, saying 'that's private, I don't want to answer.' The BBC described them as 'shy Tories.'

Try saying that phrase fast.

I watched one of the last Gallup interviewers doing the last survey on the Six o' Clock News. She had a fawn gaberdine raincoat like mine. The fashion was catching and semi-waterproof.

We knew what was happening  before the BBC . Gillyanne was apologetic. She was in the same situation as us lot. She said she would miss Gallup and she was returning to office work.

'And now that you are an experienced interviewer there are other companies you can work for.'

PILES OF 'EM!

Soon my wall calendar had arcane intitials peppered over the cute illustrations-- PAS - Public Attitude Surveys, MRUK  Market research UK, FF Field Focus. Some companies merged and re-emerged. The work flowed free and was allocated on a casual basis, our supervisors phoned up asking could we do the jobs and it was down to us. Surveys stoppng people on the street, longer jobs working in people's homes Shopping surveys, housing surveys, health.There was one on funeral plans but I turned 'Project Heaven' down.

We sometimes did hall tests where we worked as a group, half a dozen of us luring folk into a hotel or church hall on the High Street to sample food and drink and give their verdict. One hall test in Glasgow was a whisky job. If they drank the stuff and had a phone number that could be followed up people got a free bottle to test.

Booking a hall was the supervisor's job. We needed a steady flow of people. Getting the right area for the product mattered too. I remember testing vegetarian sausages in a small Somerset town.

'Are you or anyone in your family a vegetarian?' I asked the mother of the family group, doing her Saturday morning shopping for their Sunday roast. Her response was one of blankness, edged with contempt.

'Woy would oy be a vegetarian when oy can eat meat?'

AND I HAD STANDARDS

I was principled about telling people exactly how long a survey would take if they asked and would let them escape if they were on a tight schedule. Some of my colleagues would say 'and it only takes a couple of minutes' when it was twenty. And they would approach people who looked mentally vulnerable hoping that if they switched on the persuasive charm all headlights blazing that these would be the ones who would stop and not march past us with a perfunctory 'Sorry, no time.' Not nice. 'If they've got a pulse interview them' was the general view. However there was a buzz about hall tests, racing as a team to zip through our quota as fast as we could, busting a gut to get that last person in a hard to find category. The over 65,  who planned to buy a Ferrari within the next three months. My example is hypothetical and only a fraction 'stretched.'

How did we do it? It said in the job description we 'had to cope with rejection' The only way to handle the job was to assume that everyone I approached would stop.

I stopped about one in three, a bit like the Ancient Mariner! And I got to know people and neigbourhoods as stations viewed from a slow moving train.

THE SURVEY ON SMOKING

 I once worked  for several weeks on a smoking survey commissioned by  the Scottish Health Board. I was allocated two  patches of council housing. The quiet streets on the first neighbourhood with the low-rise flats and the well-tended communal gardens were full of ex-smokers though one chatty lady said she saw the teenagers gathered a sheltered huddle smoking on their way to school and 'it wisnae only tobacco'. A smile at youth's tame wildness. An old man, I was forty-two and old men loved talking to me, disrobed and displayed his triple bypass scars. His doctor told him his op had cost the NHS £3,000. He did his bit and quit cold turkey.

Council patch two was high rise, towering on the fringe of the bus route. The concierges had been cut back, one man now serviced both blocks. Youngsters after school shouted and chased one another, their raucous voices echoing the stairwell. It was bleak and scary, the fluorescent bulbs highlighting the Nothing that their loose energy had to fill.I told my office I did not want to work there in the evening. That was fine.

Everyone I interviewed in that block smoked.

Did we need a big expensive health survey to know that?

TODAY

My old job is obsolete. It's all done online.

I learned a lot from it, diverse learnings. There was the info itself. Some jobs were for breweries. I sampled lots of halves of real ale in my own time, word of mouth recommendation. We  also did a lot of mobile phone jobs. I got to know the all names and makes two years before I bought one. I still dislike mobiles. I learned about health from a diabetes survey. I'm now old and prediabetic. Live long and it all connects...

 I found out cheats get caught. One batch of work in 10 got backchecked by head office. My supervisor had a chat with me about a batch of 20. On the very last one I had made a woman 25 when she was 24 to fit the quota and finish the job. My telling--off was mild. 'they found this, what have you to say?' 'Yeh, guilty.' 'Next time just write the correct age. They deduct 50p' Worth knowing...

Listening and not judging or bringing myself into it, the job's about them not about me. Risk assessment too, working with strangers on my own thinking on my feet. If anything does not feel right, we were trained, close the interview instantly say  'thank you for helping us today' hand them their thank you leaflet from the Market Research Society and scram. 'Never interview anyone under the influence of drink or drugs'. Their stuff could be stronger. I once reeled across Leith Walk to the bus stop, my head flying, babbling into the phone box to my babysitter.

It could be a slog in bitter weather. I remember cycling across the snow packed Meadows, the littl'un packed into my bike carrier like a small frozen eskimo with her mittens and her woollen hat tied beneath her hooded anorak, delivering her to nursery and then working in fiver layers of clothes. However something in this quirky talking to strangers job chimed with me, fed into my sense of people's equality and story.

I have always been a persistent sod.

And I look back now at the people I spoke with in the highrise block, on that smoking survey.. One of the 'peripheral housing schemes' that Edinburgh politicians refer to when they codify the wretchedness of the poor that is and yet is not. Their threadbare sitting rooms. Lorraine with her easel and her selfportrait in oils telling me of her brother in law's respect for her artistry. Wee Brian and his open university course, musing on his family history and his train driver father, how he came from the 'aristocracy of labour', unhurried Chris who liked a can of beer and a puff of weed who waited for three months for his keys from the Council sleeping on his friend's settee. People like me.

We were lucky in a way. Time to talk. Time to listen.