Introduction

This book is about the historical development of "survey research"-an instrument that serves as something of a social telescope in the social sciences. In the pages that follow, social scientists consider other metaphors for this new instrument: should it be called a social microscope, perhaps, or a spectroscope, or a "demoscope" or social barometer for recording the ups and downs of political and social tensions all over the globe? The image of the "far-seeing" telescope is more apt than the others, for one uses the survey telescope to scan some rim of the social world, without any real hope of resolving great detail, looking instead for large shapes of social geography, movements of populations, flows of information, opinion, and feeling.