Article ID: CBB001321200

Research Methodology in Mass Observation Past and Present: “Scientifically, about as Valuable as a Chimpanzee's Tea Party at the Zoo”? (2013)

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Since its earliest days, the validity of Mass Observation (MO) as a research resource has been widely debated and this applies no less to recent Mass Observation Project-generated material, as will be discussed below.1 MO was established in 1937 by three upper-class and left-leaning young men (schoolboy ornithologist turned amateur anthropologist, Tom Harrisson; journalist and poet Charles Madge; and painter, writer and documentary-film maker Humphrey Jennings), with the aim of providing `an anthropology of ourselves'.2 Grounded in the argument that the press and government repeatedly made claims on behalf of the `man in the street' but never tried to access his views, and frustrated with the `timid, bookish and unproductive' attempts by the burgeoning academic disciplines of anthropology and sociology to undertake this work, MO tried to establish more imaginative and active means of documenting patterns of popular experience. They hoped to generate material evidence by and of `the mass' that would provide access to the thoughts, feelings and behaviour of the `ordinary' person on a strikingly diverse range of topics, large and small. They used a `shoestring methodology',3 drawn from (and sometimes working in opposition to) popular understandings of anthropology, psychoanalysis, surrealism and social surveys, and gathered their diverse data from diaries and through `overheards', via participant observation, directives (questionnaires) and day-surveys. The wide range of accounts which ensued covered political opinion and attitudes to race, sex and class as well as records of dreams, meals, mantelpieces and dancing -- to name but a few of the project's sprawling interests. The eclectic formats in which this data was made manifest include photographs, drawings, poetry and prose, printed ephemera, lists, questionnaire responses and first-hand accounts by both paid and volunteer, trained and untrained, observers.4 This eclecticism, combined with MO's enormous scale (encompassing thousands of contributors since 1937, resulting in thousands of archival boxes of submissions that each may run to tens of thousands of words), with the sterling work of the Mass Observation Archive (MOA) since its creation in the 1970s, and with the establishment of the Mass Observation Project (MOP) in the 1980s, has helped to ensure MO's current celebrated status as a unique, extraordinarily rich and internationally significant body of material for the study of everyday life. [From Article}

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Authors & Contributors
Dirlik, Arif
Siibak, Andra
Zalc, Claire
Zumwalt, Rosemary Lévy
Masso, Anu
Männiste, Maris
Concepts
Social sciences
Anthropology
Cultural anthropology
Data analysis
Big data
Methodology
Time Periods
20th century, early
20th century, late
20th century
21st century
19th century
18th century
Places
Germany
China
Great Britain
Guinea
United States
Japan
Institutions
Mass-Observation
Human Relations Area Files
Columbia University
American Museum of Natural History, New York
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