Daniel Yankelovich, the pollster, author and public opinion analyst who for a half-century mirrored the perceptions of generations of Americans about politics, consumer products, social changes and, not least, themselves, died on Friday morning at his home in the La Jolla section of San Diego. He was 92.

His daughter, Nicole Yankelovich Mordecai, said the cause was kidney failure.

Until the late 1950s, market research, when done at all, was a relatively crude way of trying to figure out whether a new soap or a set of kickable tires would go over with the American public. Often it was just guesswork. No corporation today would risk introducing a product without knowing, in advance, how well it is likely to sell, what it should look like, what to call it, and how to package, advertise and distribute it.

Mr. Yankelovich (pronounced yank-el-OH-vich), an ebullient man with a passion for research, was part of a coterie of pollsters who changed all that. He came along at the right time with the idea that all kinds of academic discipline — psychology, sociology, statistical analysis and other offerings from the course catalogs — could be harnessed to the service of business, government and the masses.

One of the nation’s most respected social researchers, Mr. Yankelovich devised innovative surveys of small representative groups not only to track American preferences in cars and toothpaste, but also to understand the values and goals of ordinary people — what made them feel moral, happy or fulfilled, or miserable and marginalized in an affluent but impersonal society.