ABSTRACT
Social-survey procedure, in its search for regularities, is typically based on random samples of individuals drawn from a large population, and therefore focused on social atoms studied as individuals outside their social context. Since anthropologists first started doing field work, intensive research has been favoured as a means of studying social groups in situ, whether organisations, institutions, associations, informal groups or localities. This chapter argues that the in-depth study of one particular social setting yields a different and sometimes more useful perspective than a large-scale study of individuals from a whole population. Social-survey research and secondary analysis of already available unobtrusive measures usually treat the problem of the interaction between the subject of research and the researcher as relatively unproblematical. Social-survey research can of course take a different form if it is carried out on a smaller scale by sociologists themselves.
