Overview

This collection is the first to update and extend the assessment of the field that was presented in the 1991 collection The Social Survey in Historical Perspective. That path-breaking collection covered 1880-1940; this collection traces the history and legacies of social surveys up to the present day. Recent publications in this field each explore the development and legacy of a particular researcher, organization, or national tradition. Surveys and Society employs new modes of analysis to significantly expand the history of social surveys that has been told. Surveys and Society reveals the contributions of Australian researchers to social science and tracks the spread of social survey culture internationally, including in Asia and South America. Crucially, we identify more connections between and among researchers, disciplines, nations, and across the fields of commerce, government and scholarship.

Full Product Details

Author:   Charlotte Greenhalgh ,  Clare Corbould ,  Warwick Anderson
Publisher:   Berghahn Books
Imprint:   Berghahn Books
ISBN:  

9781836954033

ISBN 10:   1836954034
Pages:   302
Publication Date:   01 March 2026
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
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Table of Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Foreword: The Politics of the Twentieth-Century Social Survey Mike Savage Introduction: Everyday Empiricism: Social Surveys in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries Charlotte Greenhalgh, Clare Corbould, and Warwick Anderson Part I: The Social Survey Beyond the Imperial Metropolitan Centre, 1907-1930s Chapter 1. Extending the German Enquete Overseas: South Pacific Responses to the 1907 Commission for the Study of Native Law Daniel Midena and Anna Echterhölter Chapter 2. Researching while Black and Female: How the Unsung Labour of African American Women Pioneered Social Survey Methods Clare Corbould Chapter 3. The League of Nations International Survey of Traffic in Women across Asia Julia T. Martínez Part II: The Survey and the State 1920s–1950s Chapter 4. Facts of the Nation: Social Surveys and State Remaking in China, 1920s-1930s Tong Lam Chapter 5. Surveying the City and the Country: Universities, Social Science Research and the State in Australia Kate Darian-Smith Chapter 6. ‘We Talk So Much about Democracy, and Do So Little about It’: Surveying African American Soldiers in the Second World War David Goodman Chapter 7. The Strange Career of Social Surveys in the Early People’s Republic of China Arunabh Ghosh Part III: From Experience to Opinion: Researchers and the Emergence of the Surveyable Citizen in the West, 1940s–1980s Chapter 8. Different but the Same: Re-Reading Archived Fieldnotes from Young and Firth’s Classic Accounts of Postwar Working-Class Community in Britain Jon Lawrence Chapter 9. Happy Families and the Rise of Social Science Research in the British Popular Press in the 1930s Laura King Chapter 10. ‘Our Resources Were Ourselves’: Women and Grassroots Survey Research in Aotearoa New Zealand, 1960s–1980s Charlotte Greenhalgh Chapter 11. ‘If You Weren’t Known’: Racialized Practices of Surveying and Surveillance in Twentieth-Century Australia Katherine Ellinghaus and Jordana Silverstein Part IV: A Return to Experience when the Personal Became Political: Family Life, Relationships, and Sex, 1970s–2022 Chapter 12. ‘What Do You Think?’ The Australian Royal Commission on Human Relationships, 1974–1977 Michelle Arrow Chapter 13. Sex Talk: A Short History of the Sex Survey in Australia Zora Simic Afterword: Polymorphous Inquiries Warwick Anderson and Catherine Waldby Index

Reviews

“An immensely readable and interesting discussion of the history of social surveys across the globe, with different questions and populations in mind. The editors have done an excellent job selecting Contributors who speak to surveys in different contexts with skill.” • Prof. Matt Dawson, University of Glasgow

Author Information

Charlotte Greenhalgh is Senior Lecturer and Convenor of the History Program at the University of Waikato. Her project on the history of pregnancy in twentieth-century New Zealand has been supported by a Royal Society of New Zealand research grant. She is also working on collaborative projects on the international histories of social surveys, hormonal pregnancy tests, and perinatal medicine. Charlotte is the author of Aging in Twentieth-century Britain (University of California Press, 2018).

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