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Later in this book I will describe information gained from other sources. Twelve old people in the sample were kind enough to keep a diary of their activities for a week in the spring of 1955. Four of these diaries are reproduced in an appendix. Special surveys were made of the social and family background of old people seeking help from the social services: a sample group of some 200 people originating in East London who spent the last period of their lives in L.C.C homes; and finally, 400 people being visited by home helps in Bethnal Green. The object of these surveys was, first, to explore the respective functions of relatives and of the social services in helping to meet the needs of old people, and second, to pinpoint those groups who make the heaviest demands on statutory and voluntary provision.
In presenting the results I have tried throughout to keep individual people in the forefront. The research worker is so anxious to establish patterns, uniformities, and systems of social action that he is tempted to plan questionnaires that can be filled in simply and to confine his report largely to classificatory lists and tables of statistics. The uniqueness of each individual and each family is probably the fundamental difficulty about this. However those to be studied are selected, whether on grounds of likeness in age, situation, occupation, or class, once one meets them and behavior, relationships, attitude and interpretation.
Standard questions, prepared beforehand, mean different things to different people; they are sometimes appropriate, sometimes inappropriate; by themselves they do not provide an adequate means of thoroughly investigating subjects as complex as this. Before one can apply or interpret the reliability of answers to set questions, one needs a fair idea of the most important relationships, activities, and characteristics of each person approached, important, that is, as they are judged by him. Too many of the principal features of social life might otherwise be missed or misrepresented.
Although I believe with conviction that the methods of interviewing should be flexible and that reports on social research should convey the quality and diversity of individual and social behavior, I am not suggesting that the search for patterns of behavior, through statistical analysis and correlation, is not important. I am submitting only that once a social inquiry moves beyond simple description and measurement, for instance, of facts of a basically demographic kind, the build-up of statistics and indices of behavior becomes a subtle and complicated process that can only proceed in the context of a wide knowledge of the societies concerned. And such knowledge cannot be gained unless there is direct and continuous acquaintance with the people who are being studied.
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