| This dissertation explores the popularization of social scientific ways of knowing and their impact on modern American understandings of self and society. Public opinion polls, community studies, consumer surveys, and social statistics documenting phenomena as diverse as economic attitudes and sexual behavior first became part of national discourse after World War I. Over the course of the next several decades, growing numbers of individuals would participate, either as research subjects or consumers of information, in an American public increasingly defined by social scientific numbers and norms.; “America Surveyed” examines three key episodes in Americans' engagement with new social knowledge: Robert and Helen Lynd's Middletown studies of the 1920s and 1930s, George Gallup and Elmo Roper's polling of consumer and political opinion beginning in 1936, and the Kinsey Reports of 1948 and 1953. Each of these case studies explores first how social knowledge was made: how conclusions were fashioned out of interactions between theories and empirical results, researchers and subjects, science and “common sense.” Each then goes on to document the multiple ways in which Americans argued with, accommodated to, and absorbed social data about themselves.; Neither the production nor the reception of new social knowledge was straightforward. Researchers' presuppositions about who constituted the public meant that some Americans were excluded from their statistics, and that the nation surveyed was always a partial one. Investigators' findings and techniques—from questionnaires and “man in the street” interviews to statistical sampling—were also open to intense scrutiny from the general public. Major debates erupted over the validity and implications of new social knowledge, especially social scientists' claims to represent the “normal,” “typical,” or “average” American.; Nevertheless, many Americans willingly submitted to surveys, gave new weight to aggregate data, and learned to measure themselves through social scientific categories. Over the course of the century, statistical majorities, weekly poll results, and other impersonal data derived from strangers were becoming increasingly important in structuring Americans' social imaginations. Social scientific ways of knowing were thus crucial to the forging of a modern public and a self-consciously “mass” society in the mid-twentieth century. |
