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A study to determine if there was evidence to suggest association between the professional & personal characteristics of sales managers & their view of the good salesman. The good salesman stereotype was measured with semantic diff'ials selected (after discussion interviews with sales managers) from the bipolar adjective inventory of Osgood, Saci & Tannenbaum THE MEASUREMENT OF MEANING (Urbana, Ill: U of Illinois Press, 1957). Characteristics of sales managers included: (1) age, (2) yrs experience in manag position, (3) yrs of formal educ, & (4) professional participation. 2 industries were surveyed via direct mail; these were (a) the brewing industry & (b) the Coll textbook publishing industry. In the early stages of the study executives were personally interviewed & asked to describe their concept of a good salesman. From these discussions, a questionaire was constructed & submitted to random samples of purchasing & sales executives in each industry. Response was slightly over 40% for the brewing industry. After editing & discarding incomplete & unusable J's, there were 114 & 57 M's returned from the publishing group & 57 from the brewing industry (also, 104 from sales managers & 67 from the purchasing agents). Bipolar adjectives were factor analyzed & rotated, giving new dimensions of the good salesman. Canonical r was performed between executive characteristics (the predictor set of variables) & GSS stereotype scores. From both analyses, new concepts of what the good salesman is & what affects how he is viewed emerged. AA.

In a study reporting on regional differences in public opinion among Arkansans in 1982, Savage and Blair (1984: 65) assert "that more altruistic, less remote, and more decentralized institutions receive stronger votes of confidence." Data from a 1984 survey of Arkansans do not contradict that assertion but do allow an assessment of trends in public confidence among citizens of the state during the early 1980's as well as affording comparisons with confidence trends in the nation as a whole and in a sister state located in the industrial northeast.