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The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public
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.
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.
408 pages, Hardcover
First published January 15, 2007
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385 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
September 29, 2018
Historian Sarah Igo makes a pretty good toss at arguing that not just government surveys or academic social science, but public reception of certain social scientific surveys, help define America’s sense of itself in the mid-twentieth century. She focuses on the Lynds, who authored the influential Middletown surveys; pollsters George Gallop and Elmo Roper; and surveyor of sexual habits Alfred Kinsey.
What distinguished these three from early social scientists was their focus on the average. Most 19th and early 20th century anthropologists and sociologists focused on what was seen as marginal and/or deviant: the poor, criminals, minorities, and the “primitive.” The idea of studying average Americans was so unusual most of Igo’s subjects walked into it backwards. Robert and Helen Lynd were originally contracted by the Rockefeller people to study ecumenical cooperation between churches. Gallop and Roper both worked in sales before devising polls as means to create feedback loops between increasingly capital-intensive consumer goods ventures (things like breakfast cereals and cars) and publics. Kinsey was an expert on mud wasps before he got into asking impertinent questions to thousands of people.
As it turns out, Americans from the twenties to the seventies really dug knowing what the average American was like, or, anyway, gazing at a selective picture of what’s “average” or even more iffy, “normal.” The Lynds’ “Middletown” studies became a publishing hit, and even the inhabitants of Muncie, Indiana, the basis of the study, grew proud of their distinction as the scientifically-designated normal American city. The Lynds specifically picked Muncie not because it actually met any statistical norms of the American population, but because it had small immigrant and black populations for an industrial city its size. This actually took some doing to find in America in the 1920s, the period just after the great waves of immigration and smack in the middle of the Great Migration from the American south. Gallop only studied “likely voters,” which ruled out most black people, many immigrants, women in many communities, etc.
It was a normative assumption on these people’s parts — ironically, fostered by the ways in which social science at that time focused on the “deviant” i.e. people who didn’t fit into WASP social scientists idea of normal — that Muncie was the mean. But people ate it up. The same uncertainties about change and modernity that drove social scientists in that period also drove many Americans, including those then as yet aspirationally part of the norm (children of immigrants, for instance), to seek out and embrace a picture of “normal” that ensured them that change would not threaten a social order. This normality became a self-fulfilling prophecy as policymakers — Igo depicts Franklin Roosevelt as an eager consumer of reports about national attitudes — hewed to these pictures when shaping social policy, like the New Deal’s encouragement of single-family homeownership. We’re still living with this picture of “normal” today, even as the cracks become harder to ignore. While a little “dissertation-y,” this book is a fine monograph that gets into an important subject. ****
What distinguished these three from early social scientists was their focus on the average. Most 19th and early 20th century anthropologists and sociologists focused on what was seen as marginal and/or deviant: the poor, criminals, minorities, and the “primitive.” The idea of studying average Americans was so unusual most of Igo’s subjects walked into it backwards. Robert and Helen Lynd were originally contracted by the Rockefeller people to study ecumenical cooperation between churches. Gallop and Roper both worked in sales before devising polls as means to create feedback loops between increasingly capital-intensive consumer goods ventures (things like breakfast cereals and cars) and publics. Kinsey was an expert on mud wasps before he got into asking impertinent questions to thousands of people.
As it turns out, Americans from the twenties to the seventies really dug knowing what the average American was like, or, anyway, gazing at a selective picture of what’s “average” or even more iffy, “normal.” The Lynds’ “Middletown” studies became a publishing hit, and even the inhabitants of Muncie, Indiana, the basis of the study, grew proud of their distinction as the scientifically-designated normal American city. The Lynds specifically picked Muncie not because it actually met any statistical norms of the American population, but because it had small immigrant and black populations for an industrial city its size. This actually took some doing to find in America in the 1920s, the period just after the great waves of immigration and smack in the middle of the Great Migration from the American south. Gallop only studied “likely voters,” which ruled out most black people, many immigrants, women in many communities, etc.
It was a normative assumption on these people’s parts — ironically, fostered by the ways in which social science at that time focused on the “deviant” i.e. people who didn’t fit into WASP social scientists idea of normal — that Muncie was the mean. But people ate it up. The same uncertainties about change and modernity that drove social scientists in that period also drove many Americans, including those then as yet aspirationally part of the norm (children of immigrants, for instance), to seek out and embrace a picture of “normal” that ensured them that change would not threaten a social order. This normality became a self-fulfilling prophecy as policymakers — Igo depicts Franklin Roosevelt as an eager consumer of reports about national attitudes — hewed to these pictures when shaping social policy, like the New Deal’s encouragement of single-family homeownership. We’re still living with this picture of “normal” today, even as the cracks become harder to ignore. While a little “dissertation-y,” this book is a fine monograph that gets into an important subject. ****
June 20, 2015
Igo's thesis is that modern surveying techniques helped constitute an American "public," creating such ideas as "mainstream culture," "public opinion," and "normal sexuality." She makes this case by examining three important surveyors of the 20th century: Robert and Helen Merrell Lynd, whose study of Muncie, Id. came to represent "typical" America; George Gallup and Elmo Roper's public opinion polls, which were understood to represent the thoughts of an "average" American, and Alfred Kinsey, whose surveys purported to uncover "normal" sexuality.
Igo shows how, in all three cases, conscious or inadvertent factors led to the simplification of a messy reality. The Lynds, for example, excluded African Americans and immigrants in their survey, so their "typical American community" in fact represented only a white, native-born community. Even though these types of studies did not describe the social world accurately, in time they helped constitute that social world, as people began to identify themselves with the polling data.
It's a very well researched and careful argument. There are certain embedded epistemological challenges implicit in her approach--for instance, to demonstrate how Americans reacted to survey data, she must resort to non-survey data (letters, public testimonies, etc). While this usually does the trick, occasionally you are left wanting stronger evidence. For instance, she writes of how Kinsey's surveys on sex helped normalize certain sexual behaviors (helped shape "normal" sexual selves, in her words) but the evidence in the text is scant.
Still, it's a must read if you are interested in mass society or the effects of ubiquitous public opinion polling on the ways we think about ourselves and our society.
Igo shows how, in all three cases, conscious or inadvertent factors led to the simplification of a messy reality. The Lynds, for example, excluded African Americans and immigrants in their survey, so their "typical American community" in fact represented only a white, native-born community. Even though these types of studies did not describe the social world accurately, in time they helped constitute that social world, as people began to identify themselves with the polling data.
It's a very well researched and careful argument. There are certain embedded epistemological challenges implicit in her approach--for instance, to demonstrate how Americans reacted to survey data, she must resort to non-survey data (letters, public testimonies, etc). While this usually does the trick, occasionally you are left wanting stronger evidence. For instance, she writes of how Kinsey's surveys on sex helped normalize certain sexual behaviors (helped shape "normal" sexual selves, in her words) but the evidence in the text is scant.
Still, it's a must read if you are interested in mass society or the effects of ubiquitous public opinion polling on the ways we think about ourselves and our society.
March 5, 2023
The Averaged American is a great introduction to three different key moments in the rise of opinion polling in the United States: the "Middletown" study, Gallup and Roper's polling (largely centred around the 1948 election call), and the Kinsey studies on sexual practices.
I found this focus to be a little... tight. Whereas I expected the book to engage more broadly with the issues of how quantification in surveying have affected many spheres of life (from politics to product development), the book really focuses much more narrowly on two vantages: those of the pollers themselves (Lynds, Gallup, Roper, and Kinsey, specifically) and those of the people being polled. Great attention is given to their experiences navigating their place in this new quantified world. We encounter endless examples of them either embracing or challenging the conceptualizations that are developed, as well as a great deal of their reaction to the enterprise as a whole.
This does lead to a slightly repetitive structure. While the three cases are meant to illustrate distinct formative moments (the focused interview, with one location being meant to represent the whole; the move to representative methods; and the move to polling on the most intimate of topics), it turns out that the reactions and challenges are largely similar. Some participants love this, others hate it, others still wish they had (or hadn't) even been part of it. What we really see is repeated echos of the same reactions across the multiple cases.
The focus on formative polling practices is hugely helpful, but also a little limiting. I was hoping to use this book in a class session on quantified, neoliberal managerialism, but because the cases sit so narrowly within these specific places and examples, it's a little hard to pull out the general issues.
All that said, it's a hugely rich resource on these particular cases. I'm so glad that Igo wrote this book, because it offers such detail and insight into these particular moments and examples.
Overall, it's a great book in the corpus of quantification and critical survey studies. I'd highly recommend it, just with the proviso that it's very much a history of the mid-century polling experience, rather than the impact of polling on society.
I found this focus to be a little... tight. Whereas I expected the book to engage more broadly with the issues of how quantification in surveying have affected many spheres of life (from politics to product development), the book really focuses much more narrowly on two vantages: those of the pollers themselves (Lynds, Gallup, Roper, and Kinsey, specifically) and those of the people being polled. Great attention is given to their experiences navigating their place in this new quantified world. We encounter endless examples of them either embracing or challenging the conceptualizations that are developed, as well as a great deal of their reaction to the enterprise as a whole.
This does lead to a slightly repetitive structure. While the three cases are meant to illustrate distinct formative moments (the focused interview, with one location being meant to represent the whole; the move to representative methods; and the move to polling on the most intimate of topics), it turns out that the reactions and challenges are largely similar. Some participants love this, others hate it, others still wish they had (or hadn't) even been part of it. What we really see is repeated echos of the same reactions across the multiple cases.
The focus on formative polling practices is hugely helpful, but also a little limiting. I was hoping to use this book in a class session on quantified, neoliberal managerialism, but because the cases sit so narrowly within these specific places and examples, it's a little hard to pull out the general issues.
All that said, it's a hugely rich resource on these particular cases. I'm so glad that Igo wrote this book, because it offers such detail and insight into these particular moments and examples.
Overall, it's a great book in the corpus of quantification and critical survey studies. I'd highly recommend it, just with the proviso that it's very much a history of the mid-century polling experience, rather than the impact of polling on society.
Want to Read
April 4, 2023from New Yorker article https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...
which says that “How Data Happened: A History from the Age of Reason to the Age of Algorithms” (Norton), the Columbia professors Chris Wiggins and Matthew L. Jones ....initial chapters, drawing on earlier work like Theodore Porter’s “Trust in Numbers,” Sarah Igo’s “The Averaged American,” and Khalil Gibran Muhammad’s “The Condemnation of Blackness,”
which says that “How Data Happened: A History from the Age of Reason to the Age of Algorithms” (Norton), the Columbia professors Chris Wiggins and Matthew L. Jones ....initial chapters, drawing on earlier work like Theodore Porter’s “Trust in Numbers,” Sarah Igo’s “The Averaged American,” and Khalil Gibran Muhammad’s “The Condemnation of Blackness,”
August 8, 2019
excellent overview of polls and the creation of 'normal' America. Igo's book provides a wealth of information about who, why, and how polls surveyed the American people as an 'objective' insight into culture.
March 2, 2019
I enjoyed this book but at times it felt very repetitive. I appreciated the lengths she devled into the Middletown survey and its implications specifically
October 15, 2015
What I liked:
This is a book about sociological methods and, perhaps, about what it means for a population to see itself reflected by and through social science.
The book was clearly organized into a Middletown section, a Roper/Gallup section, and a Kinsey section in a logical sequence that followed history. The structure was easy to follow and made what could have been a complicated argument simpler. There were some drawbacks - such a neat history in three segments may have eliminated too much nuance and complexity.
The section on Middletown was lively, well-written. and the kind of thoroughly researched work that is a deep intellectual pleasure to read. Perhaps because more has been written on Kinsey and Gallup/Roper polling, those sections did not feel as dense or as novel.
I also liked that Igo takes time to discuss who the surveys and interviews did not cover, usually African Americans, homosexuals (Kinsey got coverage, others didn't), and other minorities. Revealing the absences is important, especially if her argument that Americans came to understand themselves as a group through these surveys and interviews. It is easier to present a coherent, normative unit if people who are likely to hold different viewpoints have been excluded at the outset.
What I didn't like:
Igo never quite delivered on her promise to explain what it meant for the American public to see itself as a whole, nor did she explain just how that came about.
Igo was also largely silent on the ultimate impact of major methodological differences between qualitative interviews like those conducted by the Lynds in Muncie and the Kinsey team all over the country and phone surveys. The strategies for gathering data, analyzing it, and (to a somewhat lesser degree in this case) presenting data are dependent on whether the researcher wants qualitative or quantitative empirical detail.
This is a book about sociological methods and, perhaps, about what it means for a population to see itself reflected by and through social science.
The book was clearly organized into a Middletown section, a Roper/Gallup section, and a Kinsey section in a logical sequence that followed history. The structure was easy to follow and made what could have been a complicated argument simpler. There were some drawbacks - such a neat history in three segments may have eliminated too much nuance and complexity.
The section on Middletown was lively, well-written. and the kind of thoroughly researched work that is a deep intellectual pleasure to read. Perhaps because more has been written on Kinsey and Gallup/Roper polling, those sections did not feel as dense or as novel.
I also liked that Igo takes time to discuss who the surveys and interviews did not cover, usually African Americans, homosexuals (Kinsey got coverage, others didn't), and other minorities. Revealing the absences is important, especially if her argument that Americans came to understand themselves as a group through these surveys and interviews. It is easier to present a coherent, normative unit if people who are likely to hold different viewpoints have been excluded at the outset.
What I didn't like:
Igo never quite delivered on her promise to explain what it meant for the American public to see itself as a whole, nor did she explain just how that came about.
Igo was also largely silent on the ultimate impact of major methodological differences between qualitative interviews like those conducted by the Lynds in Muncie and the Kinsey team all over the country and phone surveys. The strategies for gathering data, analyzing it, and (to a somewhat lesser degree in this case) presenting data are dependent on whether the researcher wants qualitative or quantitative empirical detail.
November 11, 2014
Focuses on the rise of polling in the period (roughly) 1920-1960, beginning with Middletown and then discussing Gallup and Kinsey. A departure from previous sorts of demographic surveys in that they sought to find what was 'normal,' rather than looking at marginal populations. The pollsters saw themselves as scientifically neutral, collecting (not creating) data, which they felt would play a democratizing role. Connects to Ian Hacking's ideas on dynamic nominalism, a dialectic exists between naming and named. The pollsters are responding to an idea of mass society (as are the consumers of the polls), this in turn *creates* a new conception of mass society, which is reflected back in the data, etc. The polls (especially Kinseys) are driven by the desire to show that there is no such thing as "abnormal" behavior, that everything exists on a spectrum, but in consuming this data, people begin to see themselves as existing on a bell curve, and identify themselves in relation to some idea of *normal* - this is the irony of 'neutral' polling. Igo suggests that her primary interventions are to focus on the consumers of polling data, rather than the producers, and to suggest that polling data cannot be read as a neutral primary source.
February 19, 2013
Igo's well-researched and interesting book shows how the rise of social statistics attempting to define the "Average American" in the mid-twentieth century both reflected and generated new categories of self-understanding. Igo does a great job of showing how some of the earliest surveys, of "Middletown" and later Gallup, threw out racial and socioeconomic complexity to get at a more more "real" picture of the average American. In doing do, the surveys themselves reinforced an exclusionary politics. Focusing primarily on the Gallup poll (which, if you didn't know, was driven by consumer marketing and advertising for most of its early "career") and the Kinsey scale, Igo convincingly shows how different groups reacted to, resisted, or accepted these seemingly authoritative statements about them. I would have liked to see more coverage of those very communities excluded by or thought irrelevant to these measures, as well as a more detailed account of how these numbers were used in more particular and practical processes of subjectification by varying groups...but overall this is a fine book with an important message.
January 23, 2016
An interesting book that is really 3 case studies, more than a complete history of the surveying of American public. The 3 case studies are well-chosen, the Lynd's Middletown series (detailed investigations of Muncie Indiana in the 1920s and 1930s), the Roper and Gallup mass survey efforts, and Kinsey's investigations in the sexual lives of Americans. She weaves a nice narrative through these case studies, about how these and other social science efforts got Americans to think more about the notion of average and normality, and how the decisions of these scientists (especially regarding race) helped shape and reinforce American stereotypes of themselves. So all good and worthwhile reading.
I downgraded it from a 4 to a 3, though, because at times the book is frankly boring. The author spends too much space belittling points. The amount of space devoted to letters written to Gallup or Roper complaining about their findings made the reading of this book drag a bit. Same in other places. I felt like the point had been made in 2-4 pages, no need to continue to spend space on it.
So overall, a good experience but with this mixed recommendation. . .
I downgraded it from a 4 to a 3, though, because at times the book is frankly boring. The author spends too much space belittling points. The amount of space devoted to letters written to Gallup or Roper complaining about their findings made the reading of this book drag a bit. Same in other places. I felt like the point had been made in 2-4 pages, no need to continue to spend space on it.
So overall, a good experience but with this mixed recommendation. . .
October 16, 2007
Social research actually changes society! But, just not how we would have planned it to. Who woulda thunk it. This book chronicles how surveys became popular during the last century, and how they actually shape how Americans view themselves ("the typical American has 2.5 kids, owns 1.5 cars..."). She does this by discussing Middletown, Kinsey's survey of human sexuality, and the rise of public polling. I liked it a lot; my only complaint was the here-and-now discussion at the end was very slim -- but it was written by a historian, so perhaps that makes sense.
March 3, 2008
This is a great look at this beginning of social science and the use of surveys in the US around the 1930s. Gives a good peak into the politics of funding, researchers personal perspective biasing research, and was a fun read.
July 24, 2012
So very dull. Topic aside, it wasn't well written. Her sentences went on and on only to turn back on themselves. So many clauses! Shudder! Why do people think that nonfiction always has to sound like a monotone college professor droning on and on in lecture? What a bore!
April 16, 2014
I am so accustomed to surveys that I'd not given much, or any, thought to how this developed. Igo gives a nice history our growing use and reliance on this type of information. The book is not about how surveys are constructed but rather how and why their results became popular.
June 6, 2007
This was an interesting book about the history of polling in the US. Not a very interesting subject matter, but if you're interested in it, it's a good book.
February 21, 2008
This book basically got Sarah Igo tenured at Penn, so suffice it to say that it's pretty good.
February 28, 2013
A provocative idea and well-researched. However, Igo focuses a lot on the how America reached this state, rather than on the why, which would have made for a more fascinating, timely study.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews