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A critical examination of a set of reciprocally related unstated assumptions that appear to be antecedent to & distinct from the statistical operations which follow from their adoption & use in contemporary soc sci questionnaire or schedule survey res: (1) the assumption of the validity of a survey response as a soc datum, & (2) the assumption of dynamic equivalence among survey responses, or between such responses & actual soc behavior. These assumptions are subjected to scrutiny on the basis of their congruence with empirically derived generalizations in the various soc sci disciplines. It is concluded that soc sci'ts who utilize the questionnaire survey technique would further their sci'fic aims if they would critically examine the assumptions which underlie & shape the character of their res. Modified AA-IPSA.

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Field-work was conducted for several summer periods and one complete year (1954–5) among the northern Ojibwa at Pekangekum. Pekangekum is situated in northwestern Ontario (52 degrees north latitude and 94 degrees west longitude), close to the Manitoba border and to the northern Ojibwa–Cree boundary. The major occupations of the people are fur trapping and subsistence hunting and fishing. The band is composed of treaty status Indians, numbering 382 persons in 1955, who communally own a small reservation of approximately 2,000 acres at the summer fishing centre.In 1947 the provincial government registered all the territory as traplines, and the trappers therefore became licensed in the area in which they already trapped. The band's territory, which is low-lying and poorly drained forest and muskeg, comprises 4,800 square miles, that is, about 12.5 square miles per person. During the trapping season, approximately six months of the year, the population breaks up into eighteen residential groupings, averaging twenty-two persons each, and these units proceed to the centres of the trapping territories allotted to them by tradition. Usually such domestic groupings are ten or fifteen miles apart and are spread throughout the total territory of the band, but in summer they live nearly contiguously at two major summer fishing camps.The population is made up of five extended families with patronymic totems. Formerly political authority was vested in the senior man of a domestic group on the basis of his dream-sanctioned success and power. Sometimes an individual magico-medical specialist held sway over wider territory, but his position rested on prestige rather than power, and each domestic group was usually autonomous.