What Flowed from 'Surveys Say...'

摘要

Sarah Igo's The Averaged American operates on two levels. The first is a descriptive, largely historical, account of three major social-science developments in the mid- 20th century: the Middletown studies of Robert and Helen Lynd, the rise of public opinion polls in the 1930s and 1940s (represented by the operations of George Gallup and Elmo Roper), and the studies of male and female sexual behavior by Alfred Kinsey. The second advances the conjoint hypotheses that during the 20th century America transformed into a mass society obsessed with the statistical and "averaged" and that these interrelated, survey-based developments notably contributed to that process.