Methods of social study / by Sidney and Beatrice Webb.

  • Sidney Webb
Date:
1932
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Methods of social study / by Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    81/284 (page 69)
    other students raise this particular barrier in their pathway to reality, we will explain, first, why our particular kind of questionnaire was foredoomed to failure; secondly, under what conditions and within what limitations a questionnaire may legitimately be sent out. At this point the reader who happens to be also an assiduous apprentice in the craft of investigation will do well to study the questionnaire itself (printed at the end of this chapter), in order that he may the better follow our criticism. Regarded as a process of simultaneously pooling and reciting all the facts and hypotheses already in the minds of the little group of investigators, the drafting of these hundred and twenty statements, even in the equivocal guise of formulated interrogatories, had a distinct value. By this means we registered a particular stage in our enquiry, from which we could subsequently measure the extent and direction of our advance into the unknown. Further, these questions served as a useful memorandum, to be looked at before and after an interview, so that, in seeking new facts and following fresh clues, the familiar data and hypo¬ theses about the structure and function of trade unionism should not be ignored in the interest aroused by new forms of organisation. For all these incidental purposes half a dozen manifolded copies would have sufficed. But for the originally intended object of automatically discovering facts unknown to us, either through the spoken or written word, the printed questionnaire proved a costly and even