Survey Methods in Social Investigation

C.A. Moser, G. Kalton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351896719
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This book provides a comprehensive account of the methods used in social surveys. All the stages of a survey are covered, from the original planning to the drafting of the final report. Throughout, the emphasis is on the underlying principles, with particular attention being given to sampling - a subject which often troubles students and research workers. The book will be of great value to students in social sciences as well as research workers, and people concerned with social surveys in government and the business world.

Chapter 1
The Nature of Social Surveys, and some Examples

1.1. Introduction

IT WOULD be pleasant to be able to open this chapter with a straightforward definition of what is meant by a 'social survey'. In fact such a definition would have to be so general as to defeat its purpose, since the term and the methods associated with it are applied to an extraordinarily wide variety of investigations, ranging from the classical poverty surveys of sixty years ago to Gallup Polls, town-planning surveys, market research, as well as the innumerable investigations sponsored by research institutes, universities and government.

As regards purpose, the range is equally wide. A survey may be occasioned simply by a need for administrative facts on some aspect of public life; or be designed to investigate a cause-effect relationship or to throw fresh light on some aspect of sociological theory. When it comes to subject matter, all one can say is that surveys are concerned with the demographic characteristics, the social environment, the activities, or the opinions and attitudes of some group of people.

We can thus see that a satisfactory definition would have to be couched in much more general terms than that introduced by Wells (1935) when he defined a social survey as a 'fact-finding study dealing chiefly with working-class poverty and with the nature and problems of the community'. This might have covered the classical community and poverty studies but would hardly be adequate, the first part at any rate, for the modern forms of survey mentioned above.

But although we shall use the term 'social survey' in a wider sense than that of Wells' definition, we shall not attempt to cover all types of social investigation. The methods described in this book are most relevant to the type of approach one associates with official surveys, market and opinion research, and, to a considerable extent, with sociological research. This does not necessarily mean the use of standardized, formal methods and the coverage of large representative samples. A researcher wishing to investigate certain aspects of family life may choose to confine himself to a handful of families, studying them intensively, rather than to make a more superficial examination of a large-scale sample.

These two approaches usually serve different ends and use different methods: the intensive study of a few cases will tend to dig deeper, but may lose something in generality; it will probably use less formal interviewing techniques than the other, and in the analysis of results will give more prominence to non-quantified material. This is an important difference, but the methodology used for such 'field studies' or 'field experiments' is in many respects so similar to that of the social survey proper that we shall refer to them from time to time.

We hope, in fact, that the distinction between different kinds of surveys will be made clear by the context, and we will now refer briefly to some major aspects in which surveys differ from each other. These are purpose, subject matter, coverage, and source of information.

The purposes of surveys

The purpose of many surveys is simply to provide someone with information. That someone may be a government department wanting to know how much people spend on food; a business concern interested in finding out what detergents people are using; a research institute studying the housing of old-age pensioners. Whether the 'client' in each case is well-advised to want these facts, or to seek them through a survey, need not worry us here. We are only concerned with noting that to him, as well as to the surveyor, the survey has a clear descriptive purpose.

To a social scientist, a survey may equally have a purely descriptive purpose, as a way of studying social conditions, relationships and behaviour. The sort of information needed may be how families of different size, composition and social status spend their incomes; how people are reacting to the latest productivity drive; what relationship there appears to be between education and the possibility of moving up the social ladder. In this early fact-finding stage of much work in the social sciences there is virtually no limit to the range of topics covered by surveys.

It must not be thought, however, that the purpose of surveys, whether in social research or elsewhere, is always so straightforward. Many enquiries aim to explain rather than to describe. Their function may be theoretical—to test some hypothesis suggested by sociological theory—or severely practical—to assess the influence of various factors, which can be manipulated by public action, upon some phenomenon. But, whichever be the case, the purpose is to explain the relationships between a number of variables. This may lead to extreme complexities in interpretatibn. The problems of 'causal' surveys are so important that we devote a separate chapter to them.

The usefulness of surveys (descriptive or explanatory) in social research is often debated, and one does sometimes suspect social scientists of being excessively eager to use them—to leap into the field as soon as they have a problem, collect data, tabulate answers, write a report and regard the research as finished. It is the ill-considered launching of surveys, leading to the waste of much time and money and the accumulation (often) of unwanted data, that has given rise to the scepticism with which some sociologists regard 'door-knocking' research.

It must be stressed that fact-collecting is no substitute for thought and desk research, and that the comparative ease with which survey techniques can be mastered is all the more reason why their limitations as well as their capabilities should be understood. Sound judgement in their use depends on this. It is no good, for instance, blindly applying the formal standardized methods generally used in official or market research enquiries to many of the more complex problems in which sociologists are interested.

Sometimes good judgement requires the deliberate sacrifice of quantitative precision for the greater depth attainable by more intensive methods of attack. An example will make this clear. There has been much discussion of the problem of 'early leaving' from grammar schools—pupils leaving before the end of the grammar-school course. To get the facts about this the Central Advisory Council for Education (England) (1954) conducted a national sample survey, collecting a wealth of information about the problem: its dimensions, its association with social background, and so forth. One of the vital questions arising from this survey was why children from 'working-class' backgrounds do so much less well at grammar schools than others. The official report put forward several possible explanations, among them the subtle influence of the parents' own attitude to education, the tradition and facilities of the home, and the character of the neighbourhood.

Now to assess the influence of these factors on a child's achievement at his grammar school calls, not for another national sample survey, but for intensive study, preferably over a number of years, of a few carefully selected schools. There would have to be interviews, possibly along informal lines, with children, parents, teachers and employment officers; and the interviewers would have to be chosen as much for their understanding of education as for their more routine professional skill.

Whether one could rightly call such further enquiry a social survey (rather than, for example, a field study) is a matter of terminology. What we want to emphasize is simply that there are types of field research that do not call for the apparatus of the large-scale sample survey.

To say this is not to underrate the usefulness of such surveys for many research programmes. In fact in the majority of such programmes they are invaluable at some stage. One occasionally hears a survey criticized on the grounds that it did not test a hypothesis or relate to any underlying theory. While there is often substance in this, the criticism is irrelevant to many surveys such as, for instance, the examples of straightforward factual enquiries mentioned before. Even these should always be preceded by carefully thought-out decisions about what is, and what is not, worth asking. But only in a trivial sense could it be said that this amounts to a set of hypotheses; in the narrower sense, implying the testing of a postulated relationship between two or more variables, the formulation of hypotheses is irrelevant to—and impossible for—many fact-collecting enquiries.

We must, after all, remember that the social sciences are still at an early stage of knowledge regarding human behaviour and social environment. To insist that a sociologist must not collect facts until he has a hypothesis would merely encourage the use of arbitrary hypotheses, which can be as bad as indiscriminate fact-collecting. The sociologist should look upon surveys as one way, and a supremely useful one, of exploring the field, of collecting data around as well as directly on the subject of study, so that the problem is brought into focus and the points worth pursuing are suggested. With such pilot information as a guide, a series of hypotheses can be formulated and tested by further empirical investigation.

Surveys thus have their usefulness both in leading to the formulation of hypotheses and, at a more advanced stage, in putting them to the test. Their function in a given research depends on how much is already known about the subject and on the purpose for which the information is required.

The subject matter of surveys

Even the highly selective set of examples of surveys given in the remainder of this chapter shows that there are few aspects of human behaviour that have not at some time attracted the social surveyor's attention. A full catalogue of them is out of the question here, but it will be helpful to distinguish four broad types of subject matter:¹

• the demographic characteristics of a set of people;
• their social environment;
• their activities;
• their opinions and attitudes.

By demographic characteristics we mean matters such as family or household composition, marital status, fertility, age, and so on. Some surveys, for example the Family Census conducted for the Royal Commission on Population, described by Glass and Grebenik (1954), are entirely on the demographic aspects of life, but almost all surveys include some questions in this field.

Social environment is taken to cover all the social and economic factors to which people are subject, including occupation and income as well as housing conditions and social amenities. These are subjects which cover, in the widest sense, the question 'How do people live?' The classical poverty surveys addressed themselves almost exclusively to answering this, as do many modern surveys.

Data on demographic factors and social environment are tactual and their collection presents relatively few problems. They are less open to error (if definitions have been clear) than information on behaviour and opinions, because they are more objective. Further-more, their accuracy can more often be checked.

Then there is the type of survey primarily concerned with 'what people do'—their behaviour and activities. By this is not meant occupation (which forms part of social environment) but, for instance, use of leisure, travelling habits, expenditure patterns, television-viewing, radio-listening and newspaper-reading. Much of the work of the Government Social Survey¹ lies in this field, and so does a good deal of market research.

Finally there is the type of survey concerned with people's opinions and attitudes. Opinion polls, as the name suggests, deal mainly with these; in many other surveys they are of marginal importance. Opinion questions have their own peculiar problems, and these are examined in a subsequent chapter.

Coverage of surveys and sources of data

Surveys differ markedly in the way they cover a given population— this term being used in the statistical sense to mean the aggregate of persons or objects under investigation. Thus one can speak of the population of people over twenty years of age in England and Wales; the population of miners in South Wales; the population of people travelling to work on the London Underground; the population of desks in a building.

The coverage of a survey can range from a few case-studies to a complete enumeration, from carefully selected samples to arbitrary collections of volunteers; so it is clear that in considering coverage a surveyor must settle first the extent to which he wishes to generalize from his findings. There are surveys in which representativeness is of minor importance, but in most the intention is to draw population inferences. This intention, when it exists, must be recognized explicitly and the survey designed accordingly.

In social surveys as here interpreted the main methods of data collection are observation, mail questionnaire and personal interview. Surveys also generally make some use of documentary information, but studies based predominantly on statistical data, documents and historical records are not dealt with here.

1.2. Historical background

The historian of social surveys in Great Britain has a relatively easy task. His main subject matter is encompassed within about the last eighty years, and there is no lack of records and documentary sources to guide him. He could, it is true, go further back and open his story with Cobbett or Defoe or even the Domesday Book, but it would be more sensible to begin with Eden, Mayhew and Booth. Of these Mayhew's (1861-62) fascinating book London Labour and the London Poor makes particularly entertaining reading and has been enjoying a considerable literary vogue in recent years; but it is Booth who should be considered the father of scientific social surveys.

In the eighty-odd years since Booth began his enquiry into the Labour and Life of the People of London (Booth, 1889-1902) great changes have occurred, both in the amount and character of survey activity and in the public interest shown in it. At the turn of the century two pioneers—Booth and Rowntree—were conducting large-scale surveys, stimulated by their concern about the living conditions of a large section of the population. During the next twenty years one or two others, notably Bowiey, followed their example. By the late twenties and early thirties social surveys were being conducted in London, Tyneside, Sheffield, Southampton, Merseyside and many other cities. These, while differing in details of scope and method, all followed the broad pattern established by the pioneers. Subsequently, surveys began to be used in conjunction with town planning and various government activities, and the techniques were adapted to the needs of market and public opinion research. Today a government organization is wholly occupied undertaking social surveys, market research has become a large-scale industry, social scientists regard the social survey as one of their basic techniques, and courses on survey methodology are given in many universities.

A brief historical account of these developments will be a useful preliminary to the description of present-day methods, which is the main purpose of this book. With this in mind, surveys will be mentioned either for their methodological interest or for the importance of their results. It also needs saying that the examples relate almost exclusively to Britain. Needless to say there is a great deal of survey activity in other countries, notably the United States. For the latter, a useful general reference is the symposium on Survey Research in the Social Sciences edited by Glock (1967), with discussions of the role of surveys in sociology, political science, psychology, economics, anthropology, education, social work, and public health and medicine.

1.3. The classical poverty surveys

Charles Booth's/monumental survey was begun in 1886 and published, in a seventeen-volume edition, in 1902. Booth, a rich Liverpool shipowner, had been deeply disturbed by the poverty and living conditions of the working class, and set out to obtain 'two series of facts—first, the relative destitution, poverty or comfort of the home and, secondly, the character of the work from which the various bread-winners in the family derived their livelihood' (Booth, 1889, i, p. 13). His main problem was how to collect the information about the huge working-class population of London. 'The root idea with which I began to work', he says, 'was that every fact I needed was known to someone, and that the information had simply to be collected and put together.' He consequently applied what Beatrice Webb later termed the 'method of wholesale interviewing', collecting the information from School Attendance Officers—the people who possessed the most detailed knowledge of the parents of school-children and their living conditions. Booth's approach is best illustrated by the following quotation:

Of the wealth of my material I have 110 doubt. I am indeed embarrassed by its mass and by my resolution to make use of no fact to which I cannot give a quantitative value. The materials for sensational stories lie plentifully in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
• PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• GUIDE FOR THE READER
• 1. THE NATURE OF SOCIAL SURVEYS, AND SOME EXAMPLES
• 2. THE PLANNING OF SOCIAL SURVEYS
• 3. THE COVERAGE OF SURVEYS
• 4. BASIC IDEAS OF SAMPLING
• 5. TYPES OF SAMPLE DESIGN
• 6. FURTHER TYPES OF SAMPLE DESIGN
• 7. OTHER ASPECTS OF SAMPLING
• 8 AN EXAMPLE OF A NATIONAL RANDOM SAMPLE DESIGN
• 9. EXPERIMENTS AND INVESTIGATIONS
• 10. METHODS OF COLLECTING THE INFORMATION I—DOCUMENTS AND OBSERVATION
• 11. METHODS OF COLLECTING THE INFORMATION II—ORMATION II —MAIL QUESTIONNAIRES
• 12. METHODS OF COLLECTING THE INFORMATION III—INTERVIEWING
• 13. QUESTIONNAIRES
• 14. SCALING METHODS
• 15. RESPONSE ERRORS
• 16. PROCESSING OF THE DATA
• 17. ANALYSIS, INTERPRETATION AND PRESENTATION
• 18. CONCLUDING REMARKS
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX OF NAMES AND ORGANIZATIONS
• INDEX OF SUBJECTS