Surveying public opinion at Iranian universities in the emergency conditions of war: A problem of data or a problem of understanding?

Aghasi, Mohammad

doi:10.22035/jicr.2026.3660.3866

Surveying public opinion at Iranian universities in the emergency conditions of war: A problem of data or a problem of understanding?

Document Type : Scientific Research Manuscript

Author

Mohammad Aghasi

Assistant Professor, Department of Communication and Cyberspace, Institute for Cultural and Social Studies, Tehran, Iran

10.22035/jicr.2026.3660.3866

Abstract

This article examines the methodological and sociological challenges of measuring public opinion in Iranian universities under wartime emergency conditions. Whereas conventional accounts reduce the difficulty of opinion measurement during crises to technical problems of sampling bias, declining response rates, and fear effects, this article argues that wartime emergency produces a deeper crisis in the interpretation and representation of public opinion itself. Under conditions shaped by uncertainty, political pressure, heightened emotion, and platform-mediated communication, public opinion is no longer available as a stable, transparent object of direct measurement; instead, communicative behavior is structured by self-monitoring, symbolic conformity, emotional contagion, strategic silence, and a shifting collective mood. Iranian universities are conceptualized as a distinctive sociological case, functioning simultaneously as elite intellectual spaces, politically sensitive institutions, platformized communicative environments, and sites of emotional solidarity—qualities that generate communicative and affective data that are unusually dense yet interpretively unstable. Drawing on a critical reading and theoretical synthesis of the literature on public opinion, the sociology of emotion, and platform studies, the article shows that the central problem is not the scarcity or distortion of data but the instability of meaning under emergency conditions. Its central claim is that wartime public opinion should be understood as a socially produced, affectively conditioned field of representation rather than a pre-existing reality awaiting discovery. The article concludes by offering a sociological reinterpretation of public opinion research in contemporary emergency societies.

Keywords

Iranian universities

platform society

public opinion

sociology of emotion

wartime emergency

Subjects

War, Society and University

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