At a time when there are growing demands on survey research to deal with controversial social problems, resistance to surveys threatens to make such research increasingly difficult. Based on experience with a protest against a study of adolescent health in a well-known ghetto, this paper addresses itself to the sources of this resistance, some of the forms which it takes, and its implications for our field. We face the problem of justifying ourselves and the work we do: not only is our usefulness to communities and study populations uncertain; but we have yet systematically to codify our relationships with informants (as in medicine or law). Resistance to social research will be overcome when we have done far more than heretofore to win the confidence of the communities and populations we are studying by involving them in the research process, protecting their rights to privacy, and demonstrating that what we are doing can be of some value to them.
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Eric Josephson (1970) studied this question.