The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public

by Sarah E. Igo

Overview

Americans today “know” that a majority of the population supports the death penalty, that half of all marriages end in divorce, and that four out of five prefer a particular brand of toothpaste. Through statistics like these, we feel that we understand our fellow citizens. But remarkably, such data—now woven into our social fabric—became common currency only in the last century. Sarah Igo tells the story, for the first time, of how opinion polls, man-in-the-street interviews, sex surveys, community studies, and consumer research transformed the United States public.

Igo argues that modern surveys, from the Middletown studies to the Gallup Poll and the Kinsey Reports, projected new visions of the nation: authoritative accounts of majorities and minorities, the mainstream and the marginal. They also infiltrated the lives of those who opened their doors to pollsters, or measured their habits and beliefs against statistics culled from strangers. Survey data underwrote categories as abstract as “the average American” and as intimate as the sexual self.

With a bold and sophisticated analysis, Igo demonstrates the power of scientific surveys to shape Americans’ sense of themselves as individuals, members of communities, and citizens of a nation. Tracing how ordinary people argued about and adapted to a public awash in aggregate data, she reveals how survey techniques and findings became the vocabulary of mass society—and essential to understanding who we, as modern Americans, think we are.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674027428
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	04/30/2008
Pages:	408
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Sarah E. Igo is the Andrew Jackson Professor of History and Director of American Studies at Vanderbilt University.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations     ix
Introduction: America in Aggregate     1
Canvassing a "Typical" Community     23
Middletown Becomes Everytown     68
Polling the Average Populace     103
The Majority Talks Back     150
Surveying Normal Selves     191
The Private Lives of the Public     234
Epilogue: Statistical Citizens     281
Notes     301
Acknowledgments     379
Index     386

What People are Saying About This

Few scholars of twentieth century America have been able to navigate the complexities associated with simultaneous change in multiple institutions--media, social science, the marketing industry, and community life. Igo does so with tremendous imagination and panache: The Averaged American demonstrates how numbers can transform both the texture of everyday life and the very course of a nation.

Daniel Horowitz

In her strikingly bold and original The Averaged American, Sarah Igo captures the wonderfully rich and complicated relationships between surveys and those surveyed as she shows how this interaction helped create a mass public. We can see how those surveyed yearned for and understood their roles in the survey process--as well as the creation of expectations of what it meant to live as 'typical' or 'average' respondents/citizens in a mass society. --(Daniel Horowitz, Smith College)

Susan Herbst

Few scholars of twentieth century America have been able to navigate the complexities associated with simultaneous change in multiple institutions--media, social science, the marketing industry, and community life. Igo does so with tremendous imagination and panache: The Averaged American demonstrates how numbers can transform both the texture of everyday life and the very course of a nation. --(Susan Herbst, Provost, The University at Albany, State University of New York)

Jackson Lears

A brilliant and probing inquiry into one of the subtlest but most significant developments of our time: the cultural construction of a mass society. The Averaged American illuminates the ideological uses of quantitative social research with extraordinary verve and acuity. --(Jackson Lears, editor of Raritan and author of Something for Nothing: Luck in America)

Alice O'Connor

The Averaged American is an engaging, impressively researched history of the social scientific quest to conjure that ever-elusive "American" public: what "we" think, what "we" believe, how "we" will vote, how "we" behave. Igo shows how, despite their shaky claims to objectivity, inclusiveness, or even accuracy, surveys gradually gained acceptance as a new, more "scientific" way of knowing modern America, with consequences this important and never more relevant book challenges us to confront.
--(Alice O'Connor, University of California, Santa Barbara)

Theodore M. Porter

The Averaged American turns the history of quantitative social research into a fascinating human story of interviewers probing and cajoling and of citizens who at times were desperate to give information about themselves and who sometimes welcomed, sometimes protested the new statistical characterizations of "normal" American opinions and behavior.
— Theodore M. Porter, author of Karl Pearson: The Scientific Life in a Statistical Age

Editorial Reviews

Social scientists, pollsters, and market researchers now regularly apply the techniques of scientific sampling and measurement to their work. Indeed, survey research has become the dominant methodology used to produce social science scholarship, public and political polling, and consumer research. Sarah Igo puts into historical context the way in which these now-commonplace research techniques have transformed American society over the past century. Igo’s historical examination of survey research in America provides a compelling argument that the statistical data generated and disseminated by surveys have given America a new way to view itself—as a “mass public.

Political Science Quarterly - Ken Dautrich

The 20th century, marked by the ascendance of the social sciences in academia, brought to the US the movement to socially engineer society by surveying, measuring, statistically analyzing, polling, and categorizing Americans. Standardized IQ and behavior tests produced quantified measurements of what was average and what was normal. Polls replaced literary traditions in defining the “American mind”...”Normality” increasingly lined up with quantified averages. “Mass public” and “average American” became synonymous with the search for a coherent US culture. The character of the “aggregated Americans” emerges in Igo’s chapters on Robert and Helen Lynd’s Middletown (1929), George Gallup and Elmo Roper’s public polling, and Alfred Kinsey’s revelations of the behavior of statistically normal Americans. The movement magnified the issues involved in weighing the significance of statistical minorities. Igo’s well-written study is an excellent introduction to the problems involved in aggregating and disaggregating the US...[H]er book provocatively proposes the seeming inevitability that Americans need to understand that they will live in a world shaped and perceived through survey data.

Choice - J.H. Smith

Cultural historians of the modern era and social scientists of many stripes will find much to admire in this insightful volume. Igo reminds us how deeply steeped social scientific inquiries are in contemporary social conventions and attitudes. She also outlines the overlooked role social scientists have played in shaping today’s imagined communities, picking up where the census takers, map makers and newspaper publishers had left off during the century previous.

Journal of Social History - John F. Reynolds