Social Survey in Victorian and Edwardian Ages (1886-1915) Method and Research Tools

Social Surveys in Victorian and Edwardian Ages (1886-1915) Method and Research Tools Social statistics and social surveys developed in Great Britain from the mid 1800’s as a new method of collecting information on the population in a socio-demographic and economic character. Demographic studies had been conducted during the XVII and XVIII centuries (Cullen,1976:1-16; Stone, 1997) on the distribution of population, poverty, morality and so on, but only in the 80’s of the XIX century, social statistics became a systematic study of the population referring to a vast series of demographic variables which measured the distribution and growth of the population, the age groups, the civil condition, birth, death, health, social hardships, occupation, poverty (Marsh, 1985). These statistics also allowed for the comparison between the state of the variables between the social groups as well as in the different local contexts. (Bulmer, Bales, Kish Sklar, 1991:6). The interest of the social surveys movement, already active in the 30’s and 40’s of the 1800’s (Bulmer, 1982), concentrated, during the last twenty years of the century, on a systematic analysis mainly on poverty and social diseases also in harmony with the principles and the climate of the Victorian age which was geared towards the knowledge and betterment of the social conditions of the poorest classes in a context of gradual and incisive overcoming of social hardships (Ameliorism) (Abrams, 1968; 1985). Poverty was considered an emerging problem (“a problem of all problems”, said Booth) in a society which experimented an incredible development of industrialization and urbanization. Poverty represented, for social researchers, a multidimensional concept (income, housing, wealth, spatial segregation, education, employment, etc.) which needed the construction of specific indicators to allow for an empirical analysis and the predisposition of adequate instruments of investigation to use, referring to specific spatial contexts, above all of an urban kind. In this way, the social researchers collected information and data on this emerging social problem, through direct and deep investigations which used specific strategies to collect the information, so as to transform it into statistical data. The data collected through the Population Census (in Great Britain the first Census dates back to the year 1801) and various experiences for collecting statistical data carried out by Statistical Societies on poverty and on the institutional contexts of poverty (school, churches, work houses, alehouses and prisons), showed only an approximate and not systematic view of the conditions of social diseases and poverty: “The statisticians were continually surprised by their own findings, and new insights, new studies, and new interpretations sprang from their surprise… Further fact-finding to resolve the difficulty was plainly called for”(Abrams, 1968:20-21). The social investigators between the end of the 1800’s and the beginning of the 1900’s, worked on a method and on innovative instruments of research: “ It was non until about 1880, however, that the first significant steps towards modern scientific social investigation by social surveys were taken” ( Bulmer, 1982:9) The social investigators operated with a positivistic approach, an epistemological and methodological approach prevalent in natural sciences as well as in human sciences between the end of the 1800’s and the beginning of the 1900’s (Gallino, 1992; Borutti, 1999). They concentrated on fact-gathering to organize in data, that, through an inductive approach, would have led to empirical generalizations. The cognitive approach of the social surveys concentrated on the exploration/description of the phenomenon of poverty, on the determination of criteria for the classification of the degree which one could express, with the end result of measuring and comparing the levels of poverty in the different local contexts. The three inquiries analyzed (lead by Booth in London in the years 1886-1903, by Rowntree in York in 1899, by Bowley in Northampton, Warrington, Stanley, Reading in the following years 1912-13) were specifically oriented towards fact-gathering, without referring to a theoretical perspective helpful for the construction of a hypothesis to submit to an empirical control (Glazer, 1959; Bulmer, 1991). Even in this homogeneous methodological approach, the research analyzed is a representation of the evolutionary line of the social survey movement in terms of progressive refining of the method and the instruments of the empirical analysis. They became the model for the following great numbers of inquiries carried out on the social condition of the population in other urban realities (Bulmer, 1991). In this context, the research of C. Booth Life and Labour of the People in London (1886-1903), represents the answer to the need of starting an investigation on poverty going beyond the limits of the Census analyses and preparing a new method of social survey, based on the multiplicity of investigation instruments and on the construction of indicators able to analyse and describe in a correct way the characteristics and the levels of poverty present in the population. Even in this frame of methodological innovation, one can point out the continuity of the type and structure of the instruments of investigation which recall the instruments of the Census, (see Figure 1, which presents the schedule used in the Census of the UK and Wales in 1881). In the Poverty Survey, the most relevant section of the vast research carried out by Booth and his collaborators, used notebooks printed earlier which formed a kind of matrix which had headings (as variables) in columns for empirical observation and in rows which set units of analysis (first the household and successively, also the street). Regarding this T.S. and M.B. Simey observe: “The Census had already been begun in the first half of the nineteenth century, and was, indeed, a necessary prerequisite of the kind of inquiry which he developed, it provided him, moreover, with both stimulus and opportunity to undertake more detailed and more penetrating researches” (T.S., M.B., Simey, 1960: 244). Even if Booth tended to collocate his cognitive approach between deduction and induction (Simey, 1968; Bales, 1991:67), in his research collecting the facts, a priority was putting aside any theoretical references: the specific objective of the research was to collect information on the conditions of life and work of the population of London through researchers who were immersed in its social reality and had a deep knowledge of their life and work. Right from the first research on poverty carried out in East London by Booth (Booth, 1989-1991, Vols. 1 e 2,) and after that, it extended over the whole territory of the city of London (Booth,1903, Vols. 1, 2, 3, 4,), known under the name of Poverty Survey, the research team was conscious of the need to standardize the information gathered through the interviews directed to the informants (School Board Visitors-SBV) in schedules printed beforehand (Bulmer, 1985:6). Such schedules presented the typical structure of the Census schedules, even if they offered the possibility of recording notes and observations of a qualitative type. The standardisation would have allowed for the statistical analysis of the information gathered and the possibility to compare the data referring to the different levels of poverty as well as in the different local realities. Such schedules regarded only the interviews to the SBV, while other data was collected in a qualitative way as the police-notebooks and Case-Histories (Marsh, 1985: 11-12; Bales, 1991:93-96) show. In the other two parts of the research, Labour and Industry (Booth, 1903, Vols. 5,6,7,8,9) and Religious Influences (Booth, 1903, Vol.10,11,12,13,14,15,16), the research staff had a much more relevant role through the administration of semi-structured interviews carried out with different questionnaires containing open-ended questions for the directors of firms, trade unions and social institutions which gave information on the working conditions in the different economic sectors and on the social conditions of the population. The method of the social surveys prepared by Booth, was successively taken up again by S. Rowntree in his research in York, Poverty. A study of a town life (1901) and by Bowley in the inquiry carried out in four cities (Northampton, Warrington, Stanley, Reading), published under the title of Livelihood and Poverty: a study in the economic conditions of working-class households (with Alexander Robert Bennett-Hurst) (1915). Both Rowntree and Bowley however bring significant changes to the method prepared by Booth. Rowntree tried to create a direct survey through interviews which were semi-standardised and carried out by members of his research staff on all the units of analysis (householder of all working-class families), excluding the use of informants (Hennock, 1991:190-191). In addition he projected, through a systematic way of classification, procedures which were more formalized to measure poverty, based on the calculation of the income and the relationship between income and expenses (Townsend, 1954:131-132; Hennock, 1991: 205-206). Bowley conducted, in conformity with the research carried out by Rowntree, a direct survey on the units of analysis (householder of working-class families) (Marsh, 1985:216), regarding only a representative sample of the statistical population. Firstly in the history of the social survey movement, he did not carry out the research on the whole population, but he activated procedures of selection through the use of random sampling and the probability calculus of the error. Referring to the instruments of survey, the schedules or survey-cards used by Rowntree and Bowley reproduce, with an even greater analysis and specification of the headings created, the structure of the schedule used by Booth in the Poverty Survey. Rowntree and Bowley were interested above all to try and perfect the instruments measuring the degree of poverty: if in the research on York procedures of qualitative measuring of the information remain, in the research carried out by Bowley they are completely missing. In the research report, in addition, Bowley used more advanced types of data analysis, with the adoption of statistical indeces applied to the distribution, such as media, median, standard deviation, and in an extensive way, bivariate distributions. In the three different inquiries taken into consideration, the coefficient of correlation prepared, in the same years, by Galton, Yule and Pearson, was not used in the data analysis as well as in the social surveys carried out in the following years, until 1915 (Selvin, 1976:42-48; MacKenzie, 1981; Bulmer, 1985: 110-111; Kent, 1985: 62-68; Hepple, 2001:399-401). This paper, with the great variety of themes which emerge from the research analyzed, the conceptualization of poverty, the choice of the indicators, the discussion on the criteria of classification, the specification of the causes of poverty, the quality of the structure of the data, topics which have attracted the attention of very many scholars in the course of the years, centres its content on several themes of great methodological importance: 1. kind of the research design 2. method of research 3. instruments for collecting data 4. kind of data analysis These themes will be illustrated referring to the social surveys carried out by Charles Booth in London (1889-1903), by Seebhom Rowntree in York (1899) and by Arthur Bowley in four cities (1912-13).