ABSTRACT
Prior to the Second World War, fieldwork1 dominated social research. Such classics as the Hawthorne studies, the Middletown volumes, the Yankee City series and the Chicago studies of deviant groups, not to mention the anthropological contributions, attest to the early pre-eminence of fieldwork. Following the war, the balance of work shifted markedly to surveys. This shift was largely a consequence of the development of publicopinion polling in the 1930s. Mosteller, Cantril, Likert, Stouffer and Lazarsfeld were perhaps the major developers of the newer techniques. In particular, Lazarsfeld’s interest in the two major non-academic sources of social surveys-market studies and publicopinion polling-and his adaptation of these traditions to substantive and methodological interests in sociology gave special impetus to the advancement of survey research in the universities.
