A historical perspective on the institutional bases for survey research in the United States - ARCHIVED

The basic theme of this paper is that the development of survey methods in the technical sense can only be well understood in the context of the development of the institutions through which survey-taking is done. Thus we consider here survey methods in the large, in order to better prepare the reader for consideration of more formal methodological developments in sampling theory in the mathematical statistics sense. After a brief introduction, we give a historical overview of the evolution of institutional and contextual factors in Europe and the United States, up through the early part of the twentieth century, concentrating on governmental activities. We then focus on the emergence of institutional bases for survey research in the United States, primarily in the 1930s and 1940s. In a separate section, we take special note of the role of the U.S. Bureau of the Census in the study of non-sampling errors that was initiated in the 1940s and 1950s. Then, we look at three areas of basic change in survey methodology since 1960.