Democratic societies have given to themselves many means of depicting in a realistic manner the state of their public opinion about recurrent societal issues and current affairs. Ethnographic inquiries - the interviews, surveys and quantitative studies are tools and techniques that allow, either separately or in combination and for each issue investigated, a broad picture to be painted, a picture of the opposing positions and of the balance of power between them. These inquiries, be they qualitative or quantitative, share the assumption that members of a community have individual opinions on issues of general interest, which they share with others. Their assimilation to particular classification standards transforms them into social objects that both opinion inquiries and polls and the methodologies of social sciences have to elaborate so as to deliver results significant on the scale of the community concerned. The complex and varied operations that extend from the definition of an issue to data collection and analysis are not themselves accessible in the published results. In other words, we cannot expect going from the final research results back to the operations through which the results have been produced. In other words, the local and temporal organisation of the analytic process vanishes in its final object.