Discover

'Mass-Observation' was a United Kingdom social research organisation founded in 1937. Their work ended in the mid 1950s but was revived in 1981. The Archive is housed at the University of Sussex.
Mass-Observation aimed to record everyday life in Britain through a panel of around 500 untrained volunteer observers who either maintained diaries or replied to open-ended questionnaires. They also paid investigators to anonymously record people's conversation and behaviour at work, on the street and at various public occasions including public meetings and sporting and religious events.

Contents

Genesis

Impact

Criticism

Decline and End

Relaunch

Publications

External links

See also

Genesis

The creators of the Mass-Observation project were anthropologist Tom Harrisson, poet Charles Madge and film-maker Humphrey Jennings. Collaborators included the critic William Empson, the photographer Humphrey Spender, the collagist Julian Trevelyan, and the painters William Coldstream and Graham Bell. Run on a shoestring budget with money from their own pockets and the occasional philanthropic contribution or book advance, the project relied most on its network of volunteer correspondents.
Mass-Observation began after King Edward VIII's abdication in 1936 to marry divorcée Wallis Simpson. Dissatisfied with the pronouncements of the newspapers as to the public mood, the project's founders initiated a nationwide effort to document the feelings of the populace about the historical event by collecting anecdotes, overheard comments, and "man-in-the-street" interviews on and around the Coronation of Geroge VI. Published in book form as ''May the Twelfth: Mass Observation Day Surveys,'' the result tended to subvert the Government's efforts at image-making.

Impact

During the Second World War, the Mass Observation research was occasionally influential in shaping British public policy. In particular, their study of saving habits were used by John Maynard Keynes to successfully argue for tax policy changes. The war also led to a few cases of Mass Observation doing research on commission for government authorities trying to shape recruiting and war propaganda.

Criticism

Mass-Observation has been criticised by some as an invasion of privacy. Participants were not only reporting on their own lives; they often commented on their neighbours and friends as well. Such an atmosphere of surveillance was in keeping with the rising culture of espionage, which dominated the Second World War, although it should be noted that Mass-Observation was an independent, not a government, effort aimed at education rather than manipulation of the public.
Mass-Observation had set out to turn the tools of anthropology used to study foreign cultures on Britain's; to be "The Science of Us." Criticism of the scientific validity focusing on the experiment parameters began fairly early, continued throughout its existence, and was a key element in its eventual demise. Because of the self-selecting nature of the observers, they did not represent a scientifically balanced cross-section of British society as a modern public opinion poll would. Although geograpically and occupationally diverse, the participants tended to be middle-class, educated, literate, and left of center.

Decline and End

Following the war, and the departure of project founders Harrisson, Madge, and Jennings, research began to focus on the commercial habits of the country rather than the broader cultural research that characterized its first decade. This turn towards market reserch was formalized in 1949 when the project was incorporated as a private firm. The firm and the program was abandoned in the early 1950s.

Relaunch

A reevaluation of the tremendous resource of primary historical material that is the Mass-Observation archives led to a relaunch of the project in 1981. Today, housed at the University of Sussex, Mass-Observation continues to collect the thoughts of its panel of writers through regular questionnaires (known as directives) and is used by students, academics, media researchers and the public for its unique collection of material on everyday life in Britain.

Publications

A number of publications are also available from the University of Sussex. The following selection of titles also gives some idea of the scope of Mass-Observation's work:

★ ''Attitudes to AIDS''

★ ''Bolton Working Class Life''

★ ''Children's Millennium Diaries''

★ ''Everyday use of social relaxants and stimulants''

★ ''Gender and Nationhood. Britain in the Falklands War''

★ ''Health, sickness and the work ethic''

★ ''Looking at Europe: pointers to some British attitudes''

★ ''Researching women's lives: notes from visits to East Central Europe''

★ ''Mass-Observation: des 'capsules' de vie quotidienne''

★ ''One Day in the Life of Television''

★ ''Sex surveyed, 1949-1994'' - The actual Mass-Observation survey was called Little Kinsey, the results were published in a book by Liz Stanley of the above name.

★ ''The Pub and the People''

★ ''Weeping in the Cinema in 1950''
In 2004 ''Our Hidden Lives'', an edited selection of the diaries kept by five of these observers and diarists during the post-war period was published.

★ Simon Garfield, ''Our Hidden Lives'', 2005 paperback edition from Ebury Press: ISBN 0-09-189733-5.

★ Hubble, Nick. ''Mass-Observation and Everyday Life''. Houndmills-Basinstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 2006. ISBN 1-4039-3555-6.
A history of the Mass-Observation movement from a former Research Fellow at the Mass-Observation Archive, University of Sussex, UK (from back cover)

External links

★ University of Sussex Mass Observation site

★ Caleb Crain. "Surveillance society: The Mass-Observation movement and the meaning of everyday life.". ''The New Yorker''. 11 September 2006.

★ Photography taken by Humphrey Spender for the Mass-Observation project in Bolton

See also

★ Nella Last