The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public
supports the death penalty, that half of all marriages end in divorce, and that four out of five prefer a particular brand of toothpaste. But remarkably, such data--now woven into our social fabric--became common currency only in the last century. With a bold and sophisticated analysis, Sarah Igo demonstrates the power of scientific surveys to shape Americans' sense of themselves as individuals, members of communities, and citizens of a nation.
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The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public
supports the death penalty, that half of all marriages end in divorce, and that four out of five prefer a particular brand of toothpaste. But remarkably, such data--now woven into our social fabric--became common currency only in the last century. With a bold and sophisticated analysis, Sarah Igo demonstrates the power of scientific surveys to shape Americans' sense of themselves as individuals, members of communities, and citizens of a nation.
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The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public
supports the death penalty, that half of all marriages end in divorce, and that four out of five prefer a particular brand of toothpaste. But remarkably, such data--now woven into our social fabric--became common currency only in the last century. With a bold and sophisticated analysis, Sarah Igo demonstrates the power of scientific surveys to shape Americans' sense of themselves as individuals, members of communities, and citizens of a nation.
Sarah Igo is Associate Professor of History, Political Science, and Sociology at Vanderbilt University
Table of Contents
Introduction: America in Aggregate List of Illustrations 1 Canvassing a “Typical” Community 2 Middletown Becomes Everytown 3 Polling the Average Populace 4 The Majority Talks Back 6 The Private Lives of the Public Epilogue: Statistical Citizens Notes Acknowledgments Index
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