The Social Survey in Historical Perspective, 1880–1940

by Edited by Martin Bulmer , Kevin Bales , Kathryn Kish Sklar

• ISBN13: 9780521188784
• ISBN10: 0521188784
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-04-28
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

For the past hundred years, the social survey has been a major tool of social investigation, and its use has also been linked to social reform. Starting with the landmark surveys of Charles Booth in London and Jane Addams in Chicago, social surveys in both Britain and the Unites States investigated poverty, unemployment and other difficult social conditions. While in Britain there was marked continuity between the early studies of Booth and others, in the US the social survey movement exercised curiously little impact upon empirical social science. This 2001 book traces the history of the social Survey in Britain and the US, with two chapters on Germany and France. It discusses the aims and interests of those who carried out early surveys, and the links between the social survey and the growth of empirical social science. The contributors are drawn from a range of disciplines, including history, sociology, political science, demography and geography.

Table of Contents

List of figures

List of tables

List of maps

Notes on contributors

Preface

The social survey in historical perspective

The social survey in social perspective, 1830-1930

Charles Booth's survey of Life and Labour of the People in London 1889-1903

Hull-House Maps and Papers: social science as women's work in the 1890s

The place of social investigation, social theory and social work in the approach to late Victorian and Edwardian social problems: the case of Beatrice Webb and Helen Bosanquet

W. E. B. Du Bois as a social investigator: The Philadelphia Negro 1899

Concepts of poverty in the British social surveys from Charles Booth to Arthur

The part in relation to the whole: how to generalise? The prehistory of representative sampling

The Pittsburgh Survey and the Social Survey Movement: a sociological road not taken

The world of the academic quantifiers: the Columbia University family and its connections

The decline of The Social Survey Movement and the rise of American empirical sociology

The social survey in Germany before 1933

Anglo-American contacts in the development of research methods before 1945

The social survey in historical perspective: a governmental perspective

The dangers of castle building - surveying the social survey

Index

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