The Uses of Social Research (Routledge Revivals)

Social Investigation in Public Policy-Making

Martin Bulmer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317449898
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The growth and health of the social sciences owe a good deal to the generally held belief that they are socially useful, but is this really so? Do they deliver the goods they promise? In The Uses of Social Research, first published in 1982, Martin Bulmer answers these and other questions concerning the uses of empirical social science in the policy-making process, and provides an extended analysis of the main issues.

This title provides a valuable introduction to the patterns of influence exercised by the social sciences on government. It shows how the results of social research feed into the political system and what models of the relationship between research and policy are most convincing. This book will be of interest to students of the social sciences.

1

A Historical Perspective upon Applied Social Research in Britain

There is in the development of applied social research in Britain a marked historical continuity. We begin with a discussion of this long tradition of the use of research in policy-making, since it continues to exercise a major influence upon the utilisation of social research in the present day. It is particularly important to realise that this tradition is considerably older and to some extent apart from the history of academic disciplines such as psychology, sociology or political science. The distinction between social research and social science which runs all through this book has deep historical roots which the present chapter aims to clarify. The emphasis here is upon the historical development of British applied social research, without paying too close attention to what is meant by terms such as ‘use’ or ‘applied research’. These conceptual problems are discussed in Chapter 2 once the scene has been set historically.

Where does the story begin? Any starting point is to a considerable degree arbitrary. Some would argue that it lies in the seventeenth century with the early population statisticians John Graunt and William Petty (G. N. Clark, 1948). Others would point to the beginnings of modern census-taking (1790 in the United States, 1801 in Britain) as signalling the start of modern social inquiry. Others would point to English vital registration and the establishment of the General Register Office in 1837. It can be questioned, however, whether birth, marriage and death registration is ‘social research’. The history with which we are concerned, it can be argued, begins later in the nineteenth century when adequate scientific methods for social inquiry were first developed.

These arguments about starting data are to a large extent academic. There is clearly a close connection between the scientific study of social conditions, industrialisation and intensified urbanisation. So the discussion will begin around 1830 and sketch some main developments during the nineteenth century. This is not to ignore developments in the eighteenth century and earlier (see Lecuyer and Oberschall, 1968), which must be part of an adequate history of empirical social research. The history of British census-taking and vital registration will also only be mentioned briefly (Glass, 1973; Susser and Adelstein, 1975).

The Royal Commission on the Poor Law, 1832–4

The influence of English social investigation upon policy-making perhaps became most dramatically obvious with the Report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Law of 1834. This was the first occasion on which extensive first-hand inquiries were undertaken as part of a government commission of investigation. The commission was set up to review the workings of the Elizabethan Poor Law and to make recommendations to the government for its reform. To do its work, it determined to inquire into the operation of the Poor Law in different areas of the country, for there was very considerable variation in the administration of poor relief. Thus the commission drew up three questionnaires which were sent to all districts which administered relief. This was not a great success – only one in ten of parishes replied – so as a second step twenty-six assistant commissioners were sent out to ‘ascertain the state of the poor by personal inquiry among them, and the administration of the Poor Law by being present at the vestries and at the sessions of the magistrates’. Since not all parishes could be visited, the assistant commissioners were told to select which areas they would visit. The investigators were unpaid, philanthropically minded amateurs, who nevertheless managed to cover 3,000 places, about one in five of Poor Law authorities. Their reports were published in thirteen volumes of appendices (totalling 8,000 pages) to the Report of the commission in 1834. The commissioners believed that when they reported they tendered to His Majesty ‘the most extensive and at the same time the most consistent body of evidence that was ever brought to bear on a single subject’, evidence moreover which seemed to support the recommendations of the report.

The Report itself – ‘one of the classic documents of western social history’ (Checkland and Checkland, 1974, p. 9) – had of course a most significant influence upon social welfare policy, turning it in a direction which it was to hold until the mid-twentieth century. By the Poor Law Report and particularly through the work of one commissioner – Edwin Chadwick (1800–90) (see Finer, 1952) – social inquiry became recognised as a part of policy-making within government.

The demonstration effect of the Report has been greater than its real value as social research. Indeed later scholars have not shared the commissioners’ high opinion of their own work. They have pointed to the fact that much of the Report was written before all the evidence had been collected; that the whole process was carried on in great haste in a matter of months; that much of the evidence collected by the assistant commissioners was impressionistic and tinged with moralism; and the degree of local variation and the complexity of the problems (for example, the relation between local wage levels, unemployment levels and poor relief) was much greater than the commission realised (see Blaug, 1963 and 1964). ‘Of all the empirical investigations before the [eighteen-] fifties, that which preceded the Act of 1834 was the least open-minded, the most concerned to validate the dogmatic presuppositions of political economy’ (McGregor, 1957, p. 148). Far from making a dispassionate scientific study of social conditions, the commissioners and assistant commissioners tended to select evidence in terms of their preconceptions about the nature of the problems and the kinds of reforms which were desirable. The Report demonstrated that social inquiry had an important role, but it has not been judged by posterity to be a good example of such inquiry.

This is not surprising. The state of social investigation in the 1830s was primitive, and this resulted in the grave deficiencies in the use of evidence by the commissioners. Nevertheless the 1834 Report served to distinguish social inquiry from policy-making, or political propaganda, or pressure group representations. The idea of objective scientific inquiry into social conditions was given an impetus within the sphere of government which was soon followed up.

The Influence of Chadwick

One of those who was instrumental in this was Chadwick, who in 1834 became secretary to the Poor Law Commissioners. He was a remarkable and extremely forceful public servant, a man of tireless energy and persuasiveness, if not with a personally agreeable temperament. Chadwick was concerned about the effects of insanitary conditions upon the state of the population. He saw a connection between sanitary problems, illness, poverty and the cost of the Poor Law. If there was a link between them, then a way to reduce the cost of poor relief would be to improve sanitary conditions. In 1839, with that objective in mind, he began work which culminated in 1842 in the Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population. This, unlike the Poor Law Commission Report, was a more scientific and objective inquiry. The degree of objectivity is attested by the shock with which it was received by the more well-to-do sections of the population, most of whom existed in ignorance of how the working classes lived. Chadwick himself noted the astonishment with which his account of social conditions was received ‘by persons of the wealthier classes living in the immediate vicinity, to whom the facts were as strange as if they related to foreigners or the natives of an unknown country’.

The purpose of the 1842 Report was threefold: it described graphically the appalling social and health conditions in expanding towns; it demonstrated that these conditions were proportionately worse in towns than in rural areas; and it demonstrated the inability of the central and local administration to deal with the problems which they faced. The first two of these achievements were solidly based on social inquiry. For example, the Report showed that in industrial areas the number of deaths for all classes of the population was greater for the under-20 age group than for the 20- to 60-year-old age group. Only among labourers was this true in rural areas, but whereas in those areas the proportion was 2:1, in industrial areas it was 3:1. Another analysis showed that deaths of adults attributed to epidemic disease were twice as great among the industrial population as among the gentry and professional classes, while the average life expectancy was eight to ten years lower among industrial workers. The deaths of heads of families before the age of 45 placed (it was estimated) 43,000 widows and 112,000 orphans upon the Poor Laws. The Report observed that ‘the annual loss of life from filth and bad ventilation is greater than the loss from death or wounds in any wars in modern times’. The 1842 Report had a wide effect, partly because it was well written and presented and partly due to Chadwick’s appeal to the economies which sanitary improvement could bring.

Chadwick was not alone in exercising a reforming influence upon mid-Victorian Britain. Others such as Kay-Shuttleworth, Southwood Smith and Sir John Simon (see Lambert, 1963) made important contributions to social and medical investigation and reform. With Chadwick, they were concerned with social improvement, combating the perceived evils of industrialism and urbanism. Few men in the early or mid-nineteenth century luxuriated in knowledge for its own sake; social inquiry had a purpose and an end, the understanding of current social conditions with a view (usually) to some sort of intervention. Some inquiries were undertaken by private individuals, some by and for governments, but generally the same individuals were prominent in government-sponsored inquiries.

Mid-Victorian Social Inquiry

Backing up the work of these individuals was the work of the statistical societies (particularly those of London and Manchester), founded by citizens active in social reform.

The rapidly expanding urban environment of industrialism demanded the measurement of human as well as natural resources … the stench of urban poverty drove thoughtful, vigorous, unsentimental middle-class people – doctors, bankers, those experienced in insurance and the like – to the study of social pathology … [They] organised themselves up and down the country in statistical and philosophical societies for the investigation of the accumulating consequences of urban and technological growth. (McGregor, 1957, p. 147)

Members of such societies

were united in a common sense of the usefulness of quantitative social information. Many privately enjoyed a confidence, springing directly from the logic of political economy, that facts when discovered would speak with a single unequivocal voice to indicate practical conclusions. (P. Abrams, 1968, p. 13).

By generating social facts, their members aimed to demonstrate the condition of Britain and influence social policy. Though local societies were important, the Statistical Society of London became a major forum for the presentation of the results of nineteenth-century statistical social investigation. It can be debated to what extent the members were primarily concerned with the ‘ideology of improvement’ rather than objective inquiry for its own sake (Cullen, 1975), but the significant feature is the close connection which was seen between quantitative inquiry and social improvement.

Moreover, although such inquiries were primarily statistical, factgathering exercises, there was some interest in the analysis of causes, particularly the causes of disease. William Farr, statistician at the General Register Office for forty years from 1839, exercised a most significant influence, pioneering medical statistics and population studies, providing statistical backing for much of the later work of Chadwick and Sir John Simon, and himself making many original contributions (Susser and Adelstein, 1975). As early as 1839 he wrote to the Registrar-General that

diseases are more easily prevented than cured, and the first step of their prevention is the discovery of their exciting causes … The deaths and causes of death are scientific facts which admit of numerical analysis; and science has nothing to offer more inviting in speculation than the laws of vitality, the variations of those laws in the two sexes at different ages, and the influence of civilisation, occupation, locality, seasons and other physical agencies, either in generating diseases and inducing death, or in improving the public health. (Farr, 1885, p. 213)

His own investigations included work on the causes of cholera and on the relationship between mortality and density of population, for which he produced a multifactorial explanation.

By 1850, then, several distinct types of social investigation had developed which had not existed a quarter of a century earlier.

(a) Royal Commissions were likely, in some cases at least, to undertake inquiries of their own into social conditions.

(b) Parliamentary committees investigating social conditions would call witnesses before them to provide evidence of the situation in different parts of the country.

(c) Reports were compiled by government departments, influenced by (and often written by) reforming civil servants such as Chadwick and Simon.

(d) Reports were compiled by government inspectors who were increasingly appointed to carry out supervision of certain legislation, for example, factory inspectors to enforce the Factory Acts.

(e) The statistical work of the General Register Office, set up in 1837, consisted in conducting the decennial census and compiling mortality data. (In the early years birth and marriage statistics were less satisfactory.)

(f) Statistical investigations were carried out by private individuals, most of whom were members of and reported their findings to one of the Statistical Societies.

Collectively, all but the last came to be known in time as ‘blue-book sociology’, after the distinctive blue covers in which many government reports were and are published. Applied social research had a practical policy-oriented slant before the emergence of the academic social science disciplines which are so dominant nowadays. Indeed the empirical measurement of phenomena which are now the preserve of those disciplines was often pioneered by nineteenth-century practical men little concerned with developing social theory. The evolution of ‘social class’ is an excellent example (see Leete and Fox, 1977). Moreover the materials so collected formed the basis of the analysis of the degraded, cruel and exploited working and living conditions of the Victorian working class produced by Karl Marx, notably in Das Kapital, published in 1867. In the introduction Marx commented favourably on the English practice of appointing commissions of inquiry, ‘armed with plenary powers to get at the truth’, and praised

men as competent, as free from partisanship and respect of persons as are the English factory inspectors, her medical reporters in public health, her commissioners of inquiry into the exploitation of women and children, into housing and food. (Marx, 1959, p. 9)

Most of those who undertook such inquiries were Victorian gentlemen not only far removed from Marx’s perspective but committed to Victorian values such as absolute economy in public spending and a minimal role for government. ‘Social research and social policy derived essentially from professional middle-class anxieties to maintain the stability of institutions by correcting the measured costs of inefficiencies of social wastage’ (McGregor, 1957, p. 154). Associated with a redefinition of the functions of government in the decades after 1832, men such as Chadwick and Simon were the architects of the new, industrial civilisation, professional public servants who formulated the social and administrative principles on which it was to develop. By and large they were hostile to what a later generation came to call ‘collectivism’ (Dicey, 1905). Yet their social objectives led them to greater and greater extensions of state activity to modify social conditions, albeit reluctantly and hesitantly. (For alternative interpretations see MacDonagh, 1977, and Corrigan, 1982.)

Many of the leading public servants played an important role in the statistical societies, particularly the London society (which became the Royal Statistical Society after 1887). The work of the societies illustrates two features characteristic of early social investigations. One was the belief that it was the facts that were needed, and nothing more. The task was to collect these facts (most often from the administrators of institutions, not from members of the public directly), analyse them and present them. The second characteristic was the direct connection made between social research and social reform. Lord Shaftesbury, for example, was a president of the London Statistical Society. Social reformers often believed that all that had to be done to bring about reform was to publicise the shocking social and environmental conditions which led to bad health, housing or whatever. Strong implicit moral assumptions were built into the reliance upon social research as a method of inquiry.

These twin tendencies became more accentuated in the 1850s, with the foundation in 1857 of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science (NAPSS), which flourished until the 1880s as a forum for people from all sorts of backgrounds interested in social research and social reform. Clergymen and doctors were the commonest occupations among the general membership, bu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 A Historical Perspective upon Applied Social Research in Britain
• 2 Models of the Relationship between Knowledge and Policy
• 3 Conceptualising Problems and Designing Research: ‘Deprivation’ and ‘Disadvantage’
• 4 Measurement and Explanation: Physical Handicap and Health and Illness
• 5 The Use of Social Research by Governmental Commissions
• 6 The Institutional Context of Social Research
• 7 Patterns of Influence
• References
• Index