In 1956, the Free Press published a report of Columbia's Bureau of Applied Social Research - co-authored by Merton, Marjorie Fiske and Patricia I.Kendall - which outlined a set of techniques aimed at eliciting the specific responses of individuals and groups to particular events and situations. The book may be regarded as seminal within sociology, spawning a whole field of qualitative opinion research that has continued to evolve through half a century of inquiry.