The Social Survey in Global Perspective, 1900-2020s

Charlotte Greenhalgh, Clare Corbould, Warwick Anderson (Herausgeber)

Buch | Hardcover

302 Seiten

2026
Berghahn Books (Verlag)
9781836954033 (ISBN)

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Tracing the evolution of social surveys to explore their worldwide impact across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Exploring the double-sided legacy of social surveying, as an engine of both progressive reform and state surveillance, this book reasses the empirical practices that continue to determine how we understand our world.

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.

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

Erscheint lt. Verlag	1.3.2026
Zusatzinfo	Bibliography; Index
Verlagsort	Oxford
Sprache	englisch
Themenwelt	Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung ► Politische Systeme
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung ► Staat / Verwaltung
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Empirische Sozialforschung
ISBN-13	9781836954033 / 9781836954033
Zustand	Neuware