Mass-Observation: Social Research or Social Movement?

Abstract

details about people's lives, thoughts and feelings, but more tidily sorted and thoroughly catalogued, such as government social surveys, opinion polls and newspapers. Using the Mass-Observation archive presents its own set of problems,3 but at least some of them cannot be resolved without an understanding of Mass-Observation itself. This paper is an attempt to explore possible interpretations of Mass-Observation as an organization in a specific historical and sociological context. Mass-Observation could be understood, as most contemporary accounts of the development of sociology saw it, as an organization pioneering a particular type of social research which some, e.g. Bronislaw Malinowski, saw as a vital new departure in scientific research, and others, e.g. Mark Abrams, wrote off as misguided.4 But it might be more appropriate to regard it as recent historians, like Tom Jeffery, have tended to see it, as a social movement with quasi-political objectives and an active and diverse following. Further to this, Mass-Observation as originally founded, came to an end in 1949. Its demise could be interpreted as the result of the research methods adopted, or of the stresses common to social movements, or as the peculiar product of trying to combine two different objectives: academically respectable research and the creation of social change. The idea of the social research originated with two men, Tom Harrisson and Charles Madge. Tom Harrisson was a somewhat larger-than-life ornithologist-cum-anthropologist, who left his public school to go on an Arctic expedition and left Cambridge, before gaining a degree, to go on a tropical expedition. He spent the years 1931-36 in Central Borneo and the New Hebrides islands of the Western Pacific, in particular Malekula, and published his anthropological findings on the cannibals