ABSTRACT
Inquiries into aspects of human behaviour often do little more than confirm the observations of informed onlookers, and our inquiry proved to be an instance of this kind. Our findings concerning the movement of workers in Battersea and Dagenham will not cause great surprise among those who know the areas, or among those who have been dealing with problems of the labour market in the post-war years. On the other hand, an individual observer is not in a position to know whether his experience is typical or not, and the value of a study such as we undertook lies in the opportunity it affords of testing impressions against information systematically collected from a large and representative sample of the labour force in a given area.
