Dr Samantha A. Shave University of Sussex Teacher Scholar Programme 2012 Surveys and social investigation – a history

Source: B.S. Rowntree, Poverty: A Study of Town Life (London, 1902), p. 137

Pioneers of Qualitative Research

Individuals, families and groups in the population can be said to be in poverty when they lack the resources to obtain the type of diet, participate in the activities or have the living standards and amenities which are customary, or at least widely encouraged or approved, in the societies to which they belong. The resources are so seriously below those commanded by the average individual or family that they are, in effect, excluded from ordinary living patterns, customs and activities Child Poverty Action Group

Historians of social investigation have looked over the shoulders of all kinds of inquirers, among them legions of anonymous census-takers and sanitary inspector, humanitarian reformers, mid-nineteenth- century social science association members, travellers across the class divide in Victorian London… For social historians seeking nonelite sources, for policy historians studying conditions to be addressed by state or communal action, for cultural historians recovering elusive past identities, for intellectual historians listening for points of contact between action and belief, the accumulated lore deposited in past social inquiries provides indispensable concrete evidence. Furner, 2009