Two sets of questions were employed to gather information from civil rights volunteers who conducted voter registration in six southern states in 1965, sponsored by the Summer Community Organization and Political Education (SCOPE) project of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Areas covered in the first survey, completed by approximately 80% of the 300 volunteers at an orientation session in June 1965, included personal, family, and educational background, attitudes toward whites and blacks, prior civil rights activities, expectations about the summer work, and general political and social ideas. A follow-up mail survey conducted in the fall attempted to elicit details regarding actual experiences in the South, individual evaluations of the project, and changes in social and political attitudes. The authors also collected supplementary data from field interviews, personal observations, diaries, and other documents.
The questionnaires are arranged in two sets, each in numerical order by a three-digit number. The June questionnaires are numbered from 001 to 322, and from 500 to 629, and those used to gather follow-up data range from 001 to 447 and 601 to 927, with many gaps in each sequence. It appears that in many cases, an individual was assigned the same number in the two surveys. In addition to the responses and comments of the volunteers, each questionnaire also bears the scoring marks necessary for transferring the data to computer cards. These cards and corresponding code books, are housed in the Data Archives of the Data and Program Library Service at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
