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The Social Survey in Global Perspective traces the evolution of social surveys beyond celebrated metropolitan examples, exploring their worldwide impact across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Contributors examine surveys in diverse contexts—from colonial territories to grassroots women’s organizations—to reveal methodological challenges and profound social influence. The collection illuminates how surveys shaped state power, social movements, and individual identity while often reproducing existing hierarchies. By exploring the double-sided legacy of social surveying—as an engine of both progressive reform and state surveillance—this book offers a critical reassessment of empirical practices that continue to determine how we understand ourselves, our societies and our world.
“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
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).
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