Sociology 2155: Worksheet--"The First Measured Century," part II

1.. How did John D. Rockefeller come to commision Robert and Helen Lynd to carry out a study of Muncie, Indiana, when did their study begin, and what was its scopre?

2. What was their research methodology? (How did they carry out their study?)

3. What about the moving pictures and phones? What were the worries at the time? Could we see these things as precursors of the cyber-connected world we live in today?

4. How did the Lynds view the proliferation of consumer goods? Would they have joined the narrator in seeing them as "liberty machines?

5.How did the Lynds distinguish between the working class and the business class? Is Wattenburg right that these differences were being eroded right under the Lynds eyes?

6. Describe the background to the study, "Recent Social Trends." What was the role of sociology in this study? What particularly worried William Ogburn?

7. What made George Gallup's polling so much better than that of the Literary Digest?

Sociology 2001: Groups--"The First Measured Century," part II

1. Even in the 1920s and 1930s, the definition of sociology was still very much open to debate. There were those who advocated a sociology closely linked to social reform; there were those who advocated scientific objectivity and a politically nonpartisan stance; there were even people like Henry Ford, who created a sociology department at Ford Motor Company to investigate the morals and work habits of his workers. What do you see as the pros and cons of a sociology that is done by people who are critical of their own society and working toward reform?

2. Why would books like Middletown (or Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class) become best-sellers in a period like the Great Depression of the 1930s? What might social science offer in such a period?

3. Wattenburg has some concerns with the way authors like Steinbeck, photographers like Lang, and even social scientists like the Lynds "shape their data." How big a concern should this be? Doesn't Wattenburg shape his data--perhaps even moreso?

4. What about the idea that public opinion polls are a central feature of democratic government? What did Gallup find Americans thinking about the New Deal in 1935? How do you make sense of that 65% who thought the New Deal went too far?

5. Why do you suppose the government of the old Soviet Union fired hundreds of sociologists from its research institutes and universities in the early 1970s?