Social surveys
PARTNERS Academic Summer School 2022
Dr. Chris Moreh
Newcastle University - Geography, Politics and Sociology
7/5/22
To Do List
- Read Rachel Ayrton’s (2017)
Time for a revival? A historical review of the social survey in Great Britain and the United States
(National Centre for Research Methods, pp. 1-25) - Attend the lecture on
Social Surveys
- Prepare for the seminar discussions by doing the following:
- Come up with a sociologically relevant question that you believe can be answered through a social survey. How would you design your study, step by step?
- Are there any sociological questions that cannot be answered through social surveys?
- What are the advantages and limitations of survey methodology?
- Read about the Understanding Society survey here and listen to the podcast below in which researchers involved in designing the survey discuss its characteristics and their challenges:
- What new terms and concepts have you learnt about from these sources?
More information on Canvas
Sociology and the social survey
- What is
sociology
? - What truly exists in the social world? (ontology)
- What and how can we know? (epistemology)
- How do we find out? (methodology)
A brief history
- Population counts became an essential administrative task in ancient civilizations such as China, Egypt, Greece, Persia and Rome
A brief history
- Population counts became an essential administrative task in ancient civilizations such as China, Egypt, Greece, Persia and Rome
- the Domesday Book of 1086: an early information gathering exercise in England
A brief history
- Population counts became an essential administrative task in ancient civilizations such as China, Egypt, Greece, Persia and Rome
- the Domesday Book of 1086: an early information gathering exercise in England
- Britain’s first modern-day population census: 10 March 1801
- The emergence of
population
as a meaningful concept - A process of quantification that produced new
collective social entities
- The emergence of
A brief history
- Population counts became an essential administrative task in ancient civilizations such as China, Egypt, Greece, Persia and Rome
- the Domesday Book of 1086: an early information gathering exercise in England
- Britain’s first modern-day population census: 10 March 1801
- The emergence of
population
as a meaningful concept - A process of quantification that produced new
collective social entities
- The emergence of
- Charles Booth’s
Life and Labour of the People of London
(1889)the elaboration of an adequate technique for expressing qualitative concepts and arguments about society in precise numerical terms
(Abrams 1951:41)
A brief history
- But the technique of
complete enumeration
became increasingly challenged both on practical and theoretical grounds - (Re)Turn to statistical theory and mathematical approaches to understand social phenomena at societal scale
- The concept of probability and its application to sampling
A brief history
- But the technique of
complete enumeration
became increasingly challenged both on practical and theoretical grounds - (Re)Turn to statistical theory and mathematical approaches to understand social phenomena at societal scale
- The concept of probability and its application to sampling
- Francis Galton (1822-1911):
perhaps the earliest piece of sociological research to be based on a questionnaire sent to a sample of a particular population
(Goldthorpe 2021)
A brief history
- But the technique of
complete enumeration
became increasingly challenged both on practical and theoretical grounds - (Re)Turn to statistical theory and mathematical approaches to understand social phenomena at societal scale
- The concept of probability and its application to sampling
- Francis Galton (1822-1911):
perhaps the earliest piece of sociological research to be based on a questionnaire sent to a sample of a particular population
(Goldthorpe 2021) - Galton’s commitment to the
eugenics
project undermined his influence within sociology (cf. Hobhouse, Ginsberg and the institutionalisation of British sociology at the LSE)
Sampling
- Anders Nicolai Kiaer (1838-1919):
- collected a wide range of individual-level data (on over 80,000 individuals) on a national basis that were needed in preparation for a new social insurance act
- a shift from typological to population thinking
- representativeness as a sample that was a
true miniature
of a population - purposive or
judgmental
sampling
- Arthur Lyon Bowley (1869-1957) and Jerzy Neyman (1894-1981):
- stratified sampling: using existing knowledge of the population to divide it into relatively homogeneous groups in some respects, then randomly sampling within groups
- random sampling as the best method to minimise sampling error
Bad survey questions
Bad survey questions
Bad survey questions
Bad survey questions
Social surveys in practice