Surveys and social investigation
– a history
Dr Samantha A. Shave
University of Sussex
Teacher Scholar Programme 2012
http://booth.lse.ac.uk/static/a/4.html
Source: B.S. Rowntree, Poverty: A Study of Town Life (London, 1902), p. 137
Pioneers of Qualitative Research
http://www.esds.ac.uk/qualidata/pioneers/
‘Individuals, families and groups in the
population can be said to be in poverty
when they lack the resources to obtain
the type of diet, participate in the
activities or have the living standards and
amenities which are customary, or at least
widely encouraged or approved, in the
societies to which they belong. The
resources are so seriously below those
commanded by the average individual or
family that they are, in effect, excluded
from ordinary living patterns, customs and
activities’
Child Poverty Action Group
http://www.cpag.org.uk/
‘Historians of social investigation have looked over the shoulders of all
kinds of inquirers, among them legions of anonymous census-takers
and sanitary inspector, humanitarian reformers, mid-nineteenthcentury social science association members, travellers across the class
divide in Victorian London…’
‘For social historians seeking nonelite sources, for policy historians
studying conditions to be addressed by state or communal action, for
cultural historians recovering elusive past identities, for intellectual
historians listening for points of contact between action and belief, the
accumulated lore deposited in past social inquiries provides
indispensable concrete evidence.’
Furner, 2009
s.a.shave@sussex.ac.uk