THE SURVEY 483 



In the fourth place, the survey takes from the charity-organ- 

 ization movement its case-work method of bringing problems 

 down to human terms. Death rates exemplify human units 

 in the barest essentials; but I have in mind a more developed 

 unit. Let me illustrate from the Pittsburgh Survey in the pains- 

 taking figures we gathered of the household cost of sickness 

 lost wages, doctor's bills, medicines, ice, hospitals, funerals, the 

 aftermath of an epidemic in lowered vitality and lowered earn- 

 ings, household by household not in sweeping generalizations 

 but in what Mr. Woods called "piled-up actualities." If I were 

 to set one touchstone, more than another, to differentiate the true 

 survey from social prospecting, it would be this case-work 

 method. In employing it the surveyor, because of lack of means 

 and time, must often deal with samples rather than with the 

 whole population coming within the scope of his study. These 

 samples may be groups of school children ; or the people who die 

 in a certain year; or those who live in a certain ward. The 

 method is one, of course, which is scientifically justifiable only 

 so long as those who employ it can defend their choice of the 

 sample chosen, and show where it does and does not represent 

 the entire group. 



Under this head it is to be noted that the survey is in a field 

 friendly to what we have come to call municipal research. The 

 latter is indebted for its methods of unit-costs and efficiency to 

 the accountants. These methods may be applied to city budgets 

 and city departments as an integral part of a social survey, the 

 distinction between the two movements in practice being perhaps 

 that the one is focused primarily on governmental operations; the 

 other on phenomena imbedded in the common life of the people. 



In the fifth place, the survey takes from the journalist the 

 idea of graphic portrayal, which begins with such familiar tools 

 of the surveyor as maps and charts and diagrams, and reaches 

 far through a scale in which photographs and enlargements, 

 drawings, casts and three-dimension exhibits exploit all that the 

 psychologists have to tell us of the advantages which the eye 

 holds over the ear as a means for communication. With these 

 the survey links a sturdy effort to make its findings have less 

 in common with the boredom of official reports than with the 

 more engaging qualities of newspaper "copy" especially that 



