The social survey and the puzzle of Australian sociology

Sociology was a late arrival on the Australian academic scene. But it had been preceded, and its appearance was possibly delayed, by and earlier tradition of social investigation--Christian, amateur, empirical, often paternalistic: the social survey. This paper examines the intellectual origins of the survey tradition and its influence on Australian social research especially in the middle decades of the twentieth century, before its relative decline in the 1970s. Social surveys were an important phase in the political education of successive generations of idealistic middle-class youth, a powerful instrument of social reform and publicity, a vehicle for academic empire-building, and a significant conduit for the exchange of expertise between the universities and the wider community.