Towards a history of the questionnaire

ABSTRACT

This introduction to the following five articles discusses concepts, practices and debates before and after the adoption of the term “questionnaire” in the late nineteenth century. Information gathering by way of itemized questions was established in the early modern period (c. 1500–1700). Developments associated with questionnaires in the modern period (such as mass standardized items) began in the late 1800s; but there was significant scrutiny of the questionnaire itself in the decades between the two World Wars.

KEYWORDS:

• Questionnaire
• questionary
• lists
• Fragebogen
• attitudinal questionnaire

Thou shalt not answer questionnaires

Or quizzes upon World Affairs,

  Nor with compliance

Take any test. Thou shalt not sit

With statisticians nor commit

  A social science.

(from W. H. Auden, “Under which Lyre. A reactionary tract for the times”, 1946)

1. Introduction

The wider ramifications of the questionnaire – the assumptions which shaped it over time and the social and cultural effects of its use – were being debated by the mid-twentieth century in Europe and North America. In June 1946, W.H. Auden (1907–1973) recited his poem “Under which Lyre” at Harvard University in the “Victory Commencement” ceremony, marking the return of both professors and students. While noting the war that had barely ended (“Raw veterans already train / As freshmen forces”), he warned against the new dangers of this moment. Auden objected to the expansion of institutions demanding “Useful Knowledge” and experts claiming the authority “To organise us” on the basis of new social and psychological techniques, epitomized by the questionnaire. Here he included different kinds of question-lists – questionnaires, tests, quizzes – that had taken root in science and society during his own lifetime.¹

Question-and-answer tests flooded the public sphere in the interwar years. The New York Times reported that “The Spring of 1927 will … be remembered as the time when an idea [mental tests], born in the psychological laboratory, blossomed out into a popular and all-pervading pastime.” These “quizzes” and “tests” encouraged a popular obsession with trivia – with “matters interrogative but otherwise not necessarily important” – as both a form of entertainment (in competition with crossword puzzles) and also a way to measure the aptitude and intelligence of job applicants.² But Auden witnessed first-hand the more profound use of questionnaires to assist the post-war scientific management of the social and political spheres. Only a year before delivering his poem, he worked in Allied-occupied Germany for the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, using interview “schedules” of about sixty-five questions to collect statistical data on the impact of bombing on “German morale.”³ He had to “go round and ask the Germans how they felt about being bombed,” as one British investigator (James Stern) doing similar work later put it.⁴ When Auden addressed Harvard, he contemplated what kinds of science and society were being produced through the mass-dissemination of these different types of questionnaire.

The term “questionnaire,” as we use it today, emerged in the late nineteenth century, first in French and then in other European languages.⁵ We can see that its adoption was not smooth: the indomitable schoolmaster and lexicographer Henry Watson Fowler regarded the assimilation of this word as a matter of regret, declaring in A Dictionary of Modern English of Usage (1926) that “It is a pity that we could not be content with our native questionary.”⁶ The “questionary,” dating at least to the mid-1500s, referred to a work containing selected questions and approved answers, as in a religious catechism, rather than a method of seeking new information. Fowler was trying to hold back the tide: even though “questionary” was still current in the 1920s, it had begun to carry meanings already associated with “questionnaire.” In the same year as Fowler’s protest, the U.S. psychologist Edwin G. Boring spoke of the “promiscuous questionary” as a “nuisance” and circulated an informal code of rules to decide, on a case-by-case basis, whether and how to respond to unsolicited questions about “scientific, historical, or administrative matters.”⁷ These inquiries, seeking new information, were typical of questionnaires.

Recent scholarship on the history of information has made it clear that the history of the questionnaire extends at least to the Renaissance.⁸ As John-Paul Ghobrial has observed, “questionnaires appeared as a novel feature of the media landscape of the sixteenth century as a means of collecting mass information long before the advent of modern research methods.”⁹ From the sixteenth century, various instruments, such as queries, interrogatories and formularies, were employed by individuals, nation states and academic societies in collecting information about the natural, social and political domains. These early modern (c. 1500–1700) instruments introduced concepts and formats, such as printed circulars and lists of itemized questions, later adopted in questionnaires devised within modern disciplines.¹⁰

The standardized and mass-produced “queries” and “instructions” characteristic of the nineteenth century continued to seek empirical facts by guiding observations, as many early-modern queries did.¹¹ Within established disciplines, these could be fixed and highly formulaic. When directed at new phenomena and little-known topics, however, these questionnaires often listed model-questions (sometimes prefaced by lengthy explanations) for intermediary-respondents (those who answered about or on behalf of the subject) to adapt to specific contexts. By the start of the twentieth century, however, intermediaries were falling from favour, particularly after the questionnaire method was applied to the collection of subjective data (opinion, attitude, personality, desire). Moreover, the role of expert intermediaries was no longer enough to overcome concerns that responses were merely reproducing the conceptual and formal assumptions of a given questionnaire. This was initially treated as an epistemic problem (that is, how the formulation and handling of questions might affect the accuracy of data), and, in the interwar years, this led disciplines such as sociology and psychology to study the questionnaire itself, as a way of refining its practice. Concerns about questionnaires did not typically spark ontological questions (namely, how the formulation of questionnaires might constitute the reality being studied). This is what critics like Auden did in the 1930s and 1940s.

Twentieth-century dictionaries were in general agreement that any exemplification of the term “questionnaire” must satisfy two conditions: (1) be a written list of questions; and (2) be addressed to a group of people. Although this definition loosely informs the choice of examples here, it is important to emphasize that we do not need to look far to find cases that complicate something seemingly so common-sense. For example, do the interrogative sentences need to be explicit? Folklorists have pointed to the Swedish King’s “Instructions [for] antiquarians and historians of the Kingdom” of 1630 as the first folklore “questionnaire,” even though the document did not contain explicit questions.¹² Are questionnaires always written? Linguists have experimented with asking questions via standardized picture-sets when no common language exists, or with illiterate subjects. An interviewer with exceptional memory might also keep a mental list of questions, never writing them down. In 1907, the U.S. psychologist Robert H. Gault referred to interviews as “oral questionnaires.”¹³ Many organizations and disciplines have also promoted their own idiosyncratic typologies of the questionnaire. Might a questionnaire “list” just one question?¹⁴ Equally, can we still speak of a questionnaire when information is solicited from just one person (rather than a group), or if there is just one copy being circulated among many people? Prior to the commercial availability of modern reproduction technologies (e.g. the mimeograph machine in 1887), it was common to circulate a single copy of questions (hence the “circular” passed around by administrators in paper-scarce colonies).¹⁵

This special issue is not the first attempt to consider the history of the questionnaire. Some twentieth-century scholars have attempted this within their own disciplines, sometimes as a way to legitimate forms of inquiry by giving them longer and deeper histories. For example, Gault’s 1907 article, which might be considered the earliest attempt at a history of the questionnaire, grounded the “questionnaire method” in the rise of statistical psychology.¹⁶ Historians have produced a number of valuable studies of discrete questionnaires in the decades since the Austro-American sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld remarked in 1961 that the “use of questionnaires has a long past which still waits for its recorder.”¹⁷ Sandra Puccini edited a special issue that focussed on instructions, guides and the vademecum (portable manual) used in anthropological and geological fieldwork from the mid-eighteenth century.¹⁸ In 2016, Evan Kindley published a short history of the questionnaire – placing it within the history of the “blank form” – that stressed the ubiquity of the questionnaire in marketing, psychological testing and data-mining since the mid-twentieth century.¹⁹ But there have been few efforts to place the questionnaire centre-stage in its own history, treating it as at once a tool, object, method and practice. This special issue offers a long perspective, paying attention to pre-nineteenth-century concepts and practices (in two articles) and thereby explicating the assumptions and approaches that either did, or did not, inform modern questionnaires. In addition, it provides three detailed studies that examine scientific questionnaires, focused on efforts to legitimize the study of subjectivities such as colour perception, sexual desire and consumer interests.

2. Seeking information in early modern Europe

There were sets of questions from the early Middle Ages, but these did not pursue new information. The concept of quaestio disputatio (disputed question) was crucial to the scholastic teaching of theology and law and, from the twelfth century, natural philosophy and medicine. In the undergraduate curriculum of Oxford and Cambridge, the questions (quaestiones) set for disputation, or debate, often related to doctrines in major works, such as Aristotle on logic and moral philosophy, or Galen of Pergamon on the Hippocratic medical corpus.²⁰ From the late 1500s, the English term “questionary” (or “questyonary”), the word defended by Fowler in Modern English Usage, belonged to this intellectual world and denoted works arranged in the form of questions and answers anchored to sections of a text. Such questions did not seek new information from other sources, either textual or empirical. However, from the early 1600s, queries and interrogatories did just that: they were a manifestation of the challenge of the “moderns” to so-called “bookish” study and knowledge, fuelled in part by exploration and travel.²¹ As we shall see, the significant achievement of these early instruments was the actual quest for new information on a relatively large scale. This pursuit was correlated with two major socio-cultural developments in Western Europe from the sixteenth century: the increasing scale and centralization of governmental (and Church) administration and bureaucracy, supporting both local and imperial control; and the conceptual and methodological changes associated with the Scientific Revolution.²²

Philip II of Spain (ruling between 1556 and 1598) was known to sign 400 documents in a single day; hence his nickname, “el rey papelero” (the paperwork king). His royal residence, El Escorial, near Madrid, became a massive centralized library and archive of State documents.²³ Some of these contained responses to lists of questions or, more precisely, queries and directions, sent to officials throughout Spain and its empire.²⁴ One example is the Relaciones topográficas, comprising answers to interrogatorios distributed in 1575 and 1578 which contained, respectively, fifty-seven and forty-five questions about agriculture, health and religious practices in the region of New Castile.²⁵ A similar technique was applied to the recently acquired territories in the New World. As Howard Cline has discussed, a prime mover in this quest was Juan de Ovando, a churchman and lawyer working for the Council of the Indies from 1569. In 1577 and 1584, he arranged for lists of questions and demands to be sent to officials in Mexico and Peru. This work was continued by his former secretary, Juan Lopez de Velasco, who became the Principal Royal Chronicler-Geographer in 1571. In 1577, as part of his duties, he compiled the Relaciones Geográficas, a printed document seeking detailed information about the geography, mineralogy, natural history, languages, government structures, traditions, customs and religious practices of the Spanish Indies.²⁶ As Cline remarked, “it leaves few aspects of life untouched. For the sixteenth century, it comprehensively covers matters still of interest in the twentieth.”²⁷

The Relaciones Geográficas, issued as an official document (Cédula) on the order of Philip II, contained fifty numbered sections, each titled “Question” (interrogatio). However, the content did not take a strict question form. Rather, each section issued instructions on what to observe and ask: for example, “state in general the climate and quality of the said province or district; whether it is cold or hot, dry or damp” (no. 2); “state to whom the Indians belonged in heathen times … and the form of worship, rites and customs they had, good and bad” (no. 14); “Mention any other notable things about the natural features, and any effects of soil, air, sky, which may be found in any part and which are worthy of being noted” (no. 50). In the prefatory material, which includes a letter from the King and directions from the Council on how to use this document, there is this advice: “The answers are to be short and clear. That which is certain shall be stated as such, and that which is not shall be declared doubtful, in such a way that the reports shall be valid, and in conformance with the following queries.”²⁸ Another principle, unstated here, was the urgency of putting these questions to informants with special knowledge. The King had made this point in a letter of late January 1570 to his royal physician, Francisco Hernández of Toldeo (1517–1587), who was about to sail to Mexico: “consult, wheresover you go” with a range of people “if it seems to you that they have understanding and knowledge.”²⁹ On a smaller scale, not just the State but also aristocratic families availed themselves of written questions or instructions sent to informants. In 1589, one such list was designed to ascertain the reading tastes and character of suitors of the heiress of Juan Alvarex de Toledo, fourth Count of Oropesa.³⁰

Lists of questions also played a prominent role in the Scientific Revolution. In his Instauratio magna (Great Instauration) of 1620, Francis Bacon (1561–1626) declared that the sciences had been moribund “for so many ages” (“per multa iam saecula”); consequently, “often a claim not only remains a mere claim but a question remains a mere question.”³¹ Bacon wanted questions to be put and answered, not because he thought there would be quick and final answers in his day – such as those demanded by Philip II – but because this interrogation produced information accumulated over the longer term.³² He construed “natural history” as the category under which such material about objects, processes and phenomena would be collected and later refined. Models for this project include his histories of the winds; of qualities such as rare and dense, heavy and light, sympathy and antipathy; and of life and death.³³ In the Novum organum (1620), the first part of the Great Instauration to be published, he counselled readers not to be alarmed by “the multitude of particulars” that would be amassed in this way.³⁴ In the Parasceve (Preparative), also published in 1620, he offered a “Catalogue of Particular Histories,” listing 130 topics, or “Titles,” for future collation. These encompassed celestial, earthly and organic matter and phenomena, and also “the history of man,” which included human anatomy, physiology, psychology and various crafts and technologies.³⁵ The last aphorism of this work promised that,

as soon as I can find time for the matter, I intend, by putting questions on all the individual titles, to instruct men in the case of every one of these histories what most of all should be investigated and written up to bring us nearer to the end I have in view.³⁶

Starting with his nomination as the patron saint of the Royal Society of London (founded 1660; granted royal charter in 1662), Bacon’s cosmopolitan reputation encouraged the search for new empirical information about the natural world and also, to some degree, about its human inhabitants. In various learned societies across Europe, these inquiries were pursued, in part, by means of questions and instructions distributed by letter and print to scholars, savants, virtuosi and other members of the Republic of Letters.³⁷ Those who could travel to far off places – diplomats, naval officers, missionaries and explorers – were crucial sources of information and intelligence.³⁸ Notable among the lists of questions and directions were those developed in scientific societies and academies from the 1660s: by the Accademia del Cimento (1657–1667) in Florence, the Royal Society (from 1660), and the Académie Royale des Sciences in Paris (from 1666). The Philosophical Transactions (from 1665), founded and overseen by Henry Oldenburg (1619–1677), the German-born secretary of the Royal Society, included lists of inquiries, the first of their kind to be published in a scientific journal.³⁹ The items in such lists were diverse: questions to be answered by observation, experiment or trial; directions to observe things, phenomena, places; measurements to be performed; judgements to be made about everyday versus unusual objects and occurrences.⁴⁰ In 1697, William Dampier (1651–1715) dedicated his A New Voyage round the World to the President of Royal Society, representing his own swashbuckling adventures as displaying the direct access to information sought by the Society.⁴¹ From the 1670s, some cultivators of natural history and antiquities in the British Isles circulated lists of queries in both manuscript and print, although their ideal informants were not explorers but local residents able to supply on-the-spot information.⁴²

3. Precursors of the questionnaire

These early-modern requests for information were not homogenous. Some of them did include lists of questions (not always numbered), others issued directions of various kinds to selected observers; none of them featured controlled samples of respondents. It is not helpful to regard this diversity as indicative of good or poor approximations to “modern” questionnaires, as if this were a goal of these earlier instruments. References to “proto-questionnaires” run the risk of implying such a process of maturation whereas, in fact, the seventeenth-century precursors we discuss here drew on two already-established ways of collecting information: the Interrogatory and the Formulary.

In legal terminology from the sixteenth century, an interrogatory was a question, or set of questions, put to a witness or the accused. In his Apology (1533), Thomas More (1478–1535), the English lawyer and humanist author, cited as unfair the treatment of an accused person that sought “by interrogatories and questions” to ensure that he “be driven to confesse any thing that is prohibited by the church.”⁴³ European prosecutions of witchcraft regularly involved lists of such questions. In 1617, an interrogatory comprising eighty-four items guided the commissioners of Eichstätt in Bavaria in their investigation of suspects. Some of the questions were grouped under topics, such as “Diabolical lust” or “shapeshifting.” Under the latter, one of the questions asked was “Whether she did not change into other forms; why, how, when, and by what means did it happen (no. 75).”⁴⁴ In such a legal setting, the interrogatories were numerous and quite specific, requiring precise answers. The questions assumed guilt (no. 25. “How long ago was it that she had come to this vice?”) and sought confessions (nos. 80–84). However, as we have noted, when interrogatories were used in the Spanish relaciones, they were given as categories and topics on which information should, or might, be sought without explicit questions. In this situation the informant – official, explorer, resident or missionary – had far more leeway than a witch suspect: such a person was able to decide on how to proceed, whether by observation, conversation, questioning or consultation of other reports. Despite its long connection with forensic legal examination, when the interrogatory was used in Philip II’s quest for information in natural history and ethnography, the respondents had considerable discretion.⁴⁵ As we now know, later questionnaires sought to limit this degree of freedom, as well as selecting the sample of respondents.

From the Renaissance, travel advice often comprised questions on topics under which information about countries, cities and people should be collected.⁴⁶ To some extent, this followed the Venetian example of diplomatic relazioni, in which ambassadors reported on the nature of a foreign state’s economy, government, religion and trade, paying close attention to strengths and weaknesses.⁴⁷ Thus Profitable Instructions (1633), a work representing the views of Robert Devereux (1566–1601), second Earl of Essex, Sir Philip Sidney (1554–1586) and William Davison (1554–1586), covered climate, ports, trade, fortifications and the structure of the society, thus overlapping in content with the Spanish relaciones.⁴⁸ The “instructions” given in this book are often in the form of general questions (without a question mark); for example, with regard to the geography of a country: “As whether it be island, or continent; neere, or far fro[m] the sea. Plaine, or hilly; full or scarce of Rivers.”⁴⁹ The problem was that general requests could produce rambling replies. Some twenty years later, an attempt to be more specific is apparent in the Legacie of Husbandry, published between 1651 and 1655 by the London intelligencer Samuel Hartlib (c. 1600–1662).⁵⁰ The edition of 1652 included “The Alphabet of Interrogatories” (supplied by Arnold Boate) as an appendix; these were addressed to residents of particular locations.⁵¹ The list contained approximately 360 questions under topic headings arranged alphabetically from “Apricocks” to “Wormes.” Nevertheless, as with the Spanish Relaciones Geográficas, Hartlib’s interrogatories invited information on a topic rather than demanding answers to all questions.⁵²

The second instrument, the formulary, was defined quite generally in English dictionaries of the seventeenth century as “belonging to a form.”⁵³ Ephraim Chambers’ Cyclopaedia (1728) gave more detail, explaining that it was a type of “Writing, containing the Form, or Formula of an Oath, Declaration, Attestation, or Abjuration.”⁵⁴ In this sense, a formulary displayed existing ideas or procedures – for example, in law, religion, pharmacy or medicine – without seeking anything new; it could function as partner of the questionary, setting out approved questions and answers. Some early medical works were organized as selected questions accompanied by prescribed answers. One example is the work on anatomy and surgery by the French physician Guy de Chauliac (c. 1300–1368). In 1542, an English translator called it The questyonary of Cyrurgyens, with the formulary of lytell Guydo i Cyrurgi.”⁵⁵ However, by the sixteenth century, the notion of a formulary underpinned not only forms of words but formats for recording empirical information. Whereas the interrogatory was characterized by a list of questions, the formulary typically assumed a tabular layout with columns pre-assigned to certain topics or kinds of information. One example of a pre-formatted notebook designed to collect new information is the astrological and medical “casebook,” in use from the 1500s. Structured by headings – such as symptoms, diagnosis, remedy, prognosis – these casebooks gathered details about patients such as name, date of birth, date of consultation and description of complaint. Successive visits produced a clinical history. As Lauren Kassell has observed, the physician and astrologer Simon Forman (1552–1611) recorded “eighteen hundred consultations a year in the 1590s” and his casebooks reveal that “Astrology provided a formula for recording systematic information.”⁵⁶ During the same period, ships’ logbooks began to assume a regular arrangement, ruled up in columns that specified date, time, winds, temperature, barometer and compass readings.⁵⁷ The questions (such as, what is the direction of the wind?) were implied by the headings on the columns. Notebooks structured in this way were a subclass of the “formulary”: hence “formulier” (from French, formulaire) was used in Dutch references to various navigational tables, discussed in Margaret’s Schotte’s article in this special issue.⁵⁸

In the 1660s, when some members of the Royal Society made suggestions on how best to keep weather registers, based on certain localities, the formulary – as represented by nautical notebooks – was their model.⁵⁹ The natural philosopher Robert Hooke drew up a “scheme” (or table) arranged in columns displaying wind direction, temperature, humidity and barometric pressure. Each table had space for a month’s observations.⁶⁰ In contrast with interrogatory as it was used in Philip II’s time, this kind of formulary constrained the choices allowed to informants. Logbooks and weather registers firmly directed the observer to record empirical data in places on a grid assigned to various classes of fact. Hooke’s notion of uniform topics was an essential precondition for later mass questionnaires; but, unlike the English and French navies, or the Dutch East India Company, the early Royal Society could not enforce data collection. Someone who could do this was Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619–1683), Louis XIV’s minister of finance. As Jacob Soll has explained, he ordered intendants (state inspectors and officials) to collect information on taxes, local laws, rights and benefices across ecclesiastical, military, legal and financial administrations. Colbert relied on topics or subjects and precise (even formulaic) instructions rather than explicit questions, but, unlike Philip II, he could (and did) follow up, often castigating individuals who supplied inadequate reports.⁶¹

The early conceptual pre-history of the questionnaire poses the challenge of understanding terminology, assumptions and contexts that differ from those operating when this instrument took different forms in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Three important differences can be identified. Firstly, the precursors of modern questionnaires embraced a wide spectrum of information and knowledge, ranging from natural objects and processes to ethical and religious values and practices. Today we do not readily associate the questionnaire with the physical sciences – from physico-mathematical disciplines, such as astronomy and optics, to chemistry, physiology and biology – but, in early-modern Europe, many of the sciences sought detailed information – about stars, substances, animals, plants and natural processes, such as earthquakes and volcanoes – that could not be readily found or observed in situ. Thus inquiries, queries, directions, instructions – as these questions were called by the 1600s – were crucial tools in the accumulation of empirical material across the full range of scientific disciplines, as Bacon proposed. Secondly, these questions were addressed to people with opportunities or special expertise capable of assembling the desired material and not, as often seen in modern questionnaires, to a sample population, seeking respondents’ accounts of their opinions and personal habits. As such, early questionnaires were extensions of the individual investigator’s mind and senses, a means of acquiring empirical information from sources and places not easily reachable. Thirdly, requests for information were not always presented in the form of itemized questions; instead, they were often conceived within the rubric of the interrogatory or the formulary, each having its own conventions and expectations. For these reasons, any general history of the questionnaire (which is obviously not attempted here) needs to consider which features of these early modern instruments were discarded, or absorbed, as the questionnaire became “modern.”

4. Towards “modern” questionnaires

The early-modern lists of queries and inquiries provide a baseline for the identification of defining characteristics of the questionnaire as it emerged from the late eighteenth century. Acknowledging complexities which cannot be properly addressed here, the story of scientific questionnaires in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries might usefully be told through the framework of three overlapping themes: (1) standardization and the function of questionnaires; (2) measuring subjectivities; and (3) respondents.

(1) Making things standard: comprehensive and comparative data

Until the early nineteenth century, lists of questions were usually directed towards particular people: travellers to certain regions, residents of specific localities, experts in a chosen subject. They were therefore not easily re-directed. The Danish Arabia Expedition (1761–1767), for instance, carried with it a custom-made questionnaire devised by the theologian and Orientalist Johann David Michaelis, seeking empirical evidence for natural explanations of Old Testament stories relevant to the expedition’s itinerary.⁶² Also, in the early 1800s, Thomas Jefferson probably authored the one-off ethnographic questionnaire entitled “Inquiries relative to the Indians of Louisiana,” provided to the Lewis and Clarke expedition (1803–1806). As the title suggests, it aimed at a particular group of people, but some questions were general – on “Physical History and Medicine” (“Do they ever use voluntary fasting?”) and on “Amusements” (“Have they any and what are they?”) – and thus too vague to allow systematic comparison of responses with data from other regions.⁶³

Standardization of protocols for the collection of information was urgently sought. It was the hospital regime which produced the first sets of such forms to be filled in by doctors. Volker Hess and Andrew Mendelsohn have written about “the technology of paper pre-scribing,” namely, blank sheets ruled in columns to obtain particular data. By the end of the eighteenth century, hospitals in Berlin and Vienna used these to record patient admission, diet, and discharge (or death). More detailed diagnoses and treatments for each patient came to be added, or recorded, on separately configured sheets or in journals.⁶⁴ In long-practised disciplines, such as medicine, the categories or topics written at the top of the columns – symptoms, diagnosis, prognosis, cure, etc. – functioned as implied questions. The outcome was akin to a questionnaire being filled out daily by one or several individuals. In 1883, a contributor to The British Medical Journal called for a formalization of collaborative recording. Lamenting the lack of “systematic note-taking” and the use of “merely sheets of paper (of all shapes and sizes),” he suggested “well arranged outlines,” or “forms,” which would reduce “the tediousness of note-taking” and generate “a grand accumulating record of cases.”⁶⁵

The standardized questionnaires that became ubiquitous in the nineteenth century were intended to be re-directable and re-usable in unfamiliar contexts. In 1800, the French jurist and philosopher Joseph-Marie Degérando prepared a questionnaire for observing “savage peoples” with multiple expeditions to different regions in mind: Captain Nicolas Baudin’s to New Holland (1800–1803) and François Levaillant’s to Africa (1800). In seeking comparative data, Degérando desired “the material needed to construct an exact scale of the various degrees of civilization.”⁶⁶ These standardized questionnaires not only reflected a desire to collect data at greater scales but also at increased speeds. Following reports of the dramatically declining numbers of the original inhabitants in Van Diemen’s Land and in North America, James Prichard read a paper at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1839, entitled “On the Extinction of some varieties of the Human race.” He urged the storing of information about indigenous peoples before they disappeared. Prichard’s talk moved the British Association to set up a committee to formulate and distribute a questionnaire that inspired Notes & Queries on Anthropology, which went through six editions between 1874 and 1951.⁶⁷

Diminishing terminological diversity between the 1870s and 1920s – as the term “questionnaire” came to consume its rivals – is an indication that the questionnaire method was becoming more pervasive. An Italian source of 1882 defined “questionario” as a list of questions or queries (“un … elenco di domande o interrogazioni”) and noted that the word “questionnaire” had recently appeared in French.⁶⁸ In Spanish, cuestionario was introduced about the same time. It is important to recognize that, while French dictionaries from the late 1600s included “questionnaire,” the sense was a legal one, denoting the person (for example, an officier or demi-bourreau or questionnaire-juré) who put questions to the accused.⁶⁹ There was no reference to lists of questions intended to guide the collection of other information. In Germany, questionnaire never caught on, despite the approval of a related French term, enquête (often rendered in German as Enquete), to indicate types of surveys. Instead, from roughly the 1870s, Fragebogen (literally “question-sheet”) came to dominate a plethora of competing German compound nouns, some of which (for example, Fragstück) were being used for written lists of questions at least as early as the 1600s.⁷⁰

The adoption of “questionnaire” in English probably began in the 1890s, but the word was not captured in the first edition of A New English Dictionary on historical principles, 10 vols (Oxford, 1888–1928), later called the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), edited by James A. Murray (1837–1915) and his collaborators. The relevant entry in volume 8, published in 1914, retained “questionary” but defined it in a way that included a feature of the “questionnaire.”⁷¹ This entry cited an article in The Athenaeum of September 1887 about a paper on “observations among the Fuegians in the form of succinct answers to the society’s questionary of sociology and ethnography” given at the “society of Anthropology of Paris.”⁷² In its entry on “questionnaire,” the Supplement to the 1933 edition of the OED confirmed this “modern” ring: “A series of questions submitted or sent to persons to be answered usually for the purpose of obtaining precise information on special points; especially in statistical investigations.”⁷³

Despite their familiarity by the turn of the century, standardized questionnaires regularly failed to live up to the hope that they might make big-data projects realizable. At a major conference on comparative law held in Heidelberg in 1911, a former colonial governor was filled with “pride” to learn from one presenter that not a single response to a recent legal-ethnographic questionnaire had, to date, been returned from German East Africa. It showed, he argued, that his former colleagues had their priorities straight: he estimated it would have taken a colonial administrator three to four hours each day for a year to give an earnest answer to all 103 questions about local indigenous laws.⁷⁴ In 1894, the U.S. psychologist G. Stanley Hall described feeling “helpless” when confronted with “at least a hundred thousand returns” to his “topical syllibi” (as he called his psychology questionnaires).⁷⁵ Therefore, a crucial development that aided the success of questionnaires in the twentieth century was the invention of techniques to identify small representative samples. For the first time, studying large numbers of people via questionnaires became practically feasible.⁷⁶ Election results – which validated the practice of making predictions based on small polling samples – did much to convince people of the contentious notion that large groups of human beings could be characterized statistically by generalizing from a relatively small number of responses. When George Gallop, using sophisticated sampling methods, successfully predicted the winner of the 1936 U.S. presidential race, he helped trigger the globalization of polling questionnaires.⁷⁷

In so far as questionnaires functioned as a set of instructions (perhaps also rules) for collecting data, nineteenth-century designers of standardized questionnaires such as Notes and Queries generally agreed that these instruments could serve as flexible models to inform the reflections of expert intermediaries, who would adapt questions to local circumstances. By the late 1800s, however, the view of the questionnaire as model clashed with a belief that questionnaires actually functioned – for better or worse – as a rigid set of mechanical rules.⁷⁸ Optimistic social scientists saw this purported mechanical characteristic as useful: by tightly directing responses, questionnaires might guarantee “objective” data free from judgement. However, many were worried that this same intrinsic mechanical-determinative quality (as they also imagined it) led pre-prepared questionnaires to bias results. It was this latter concern that framed the discussions of German political scientists in the 1880s and 1890s as they considered the usefulness of a pre-formulated Fragebogen for interviewing expert witnesses during government inquiries (Enquete-Kommissionen). Some argued that questionnaires were a useful guide to help witnesses prepare their testimony and aid their memory, whereas others contended that the “dry, all-encompassing skeleton of a uniformly established formula” stifled the ability of witnesses to share experiences that did not conform with pre-existing assumptions.⁷⁹

The spectacular downfall of ethnographic questionnaires at the start of the twentieth century – a caution against any Whiggish accounts of its history – heralded not only a turn away from comparative data projects within anthropology but also marked a more fundamental change across the social sciences regarding how questionnaires were thought to work. By the 1920s, a concern that pre-prepared questions might determine data was central to Bronislaw Malinowski’s push for professional anthropological fieldwork. He suggested that amateur observers, those not “fully trained in theory,” could not adapt pre-prepared questions to local contexts because they did not have the means to think beyond the “preconceptions” built into such questions.⁸⁰ The rejection of questionnaires thus became central to anthropology’s self-understanding. For example, in 1964, Charles O. Frake relied on this stance to explain why the sixth and final edition of Notes and Queries (1951) was already an anachronism at the time it was published: “The problem [that defines modern anthropology] is not simply to find answers to questions the ethnographer brings into the field, but also to find the questions that go with the responses he observes after his arrival.”⁸¹ Questionnaires, if used at all, should only be created in the field after encountering the subjects being studied.

Other social science disciplines, such as sociology and psychology, voiced similar concerns, although they viewed the questionnaire as redeemable if handled carefully. A highly revealing account of this complex shift in expectations about what social science questionnaires could achieve is found in Beatrice and Sidney Webb’s autobiographical account in their methodology textbook of 1932. In a chapter entitled “The Misuse of the Questionnaire,” they recounted their own “abortive questionnaire,” with which they had tried unsuccessfully to study British trade union movements.⁸² With a healthy dose of self-mockery, they recalled their naïve enthusiasm during the initial drafting process:

What could be more promising than to open the campaign of investigation by elaborating a list of questions to be answered by those who knew the facts? … So proud were we of these hundred and twenty questions, to which we had given a full week’s work, displayed under twenty separate headings, on separate detachable sheets, with spaces left for the answers, that, without even estimating the cost, we forthwith ordered a thousand copies to be printed off.⁸³

Their original dream was that a carefully worded questionnaire – “pooling and reciting all the facts and hypotheses” – would produce lengthy responses from equally excited administrators and captivated trade officials. The varied responses quickly dispelled the idea that their questionnaire might work as a model as well as any positivist illusion that questionnaires were, in their words, “automatically discovering facts.” The Webbs admitted that their questions had placed the trade officials in an impossible situation:

No one who did not combine the accuracy and zeal of a scientific worker with the trustfulness of a saint or a fool, could or would respond to any such inquisition into the working constitution and day-by-day activities of the organisation to which he belonged.⁸⁴

They concluded that questionnaires were not “automatically discovering facts” because the questions imposed categories that constrained respondents “within the limits of … stale facts and assumptions.” Instead, the Webbs concluded that it was best to use questionnaires only once a project was well underway. As they reasoned:

assuming that a whole range of occurrences have already been ascertained, and that what is needed is merely an enumeration of their location, either in space or in time, a precisely formulated questionnaire, confined to an enquiry as to where, when, and to what extent these facts prevail, and circulated broadcast among all concerned, may be the only practicable way of completing the investigation.⁸⁵

In this way, in the 1930s, leading practitioners in the social sciences treated the questionnaire as a variable – to be adapted and adjusted via “pre-testing” and “pilot studies” – until the categories of inquiry were more settled. However, we should not presume that questionnaires affected responses and respondents in a linear way. Historical studies of responses to early modern and modern questionnaires repeatedly show that even seemingly rigid questionnaires could elicit a surprisingly diverse range of responses. In the case of the questionnaire, the respondent quite literally completes the text.⁸⁶

(2) Asking people what they think, believe, feel and fear

Standardized questionnaires of the nineteenth-century embodied what Theodore Porter has described as a “drive for thinness” within the human sciences.⁸⁷ Information about external “facts” (e.g. wage levels, ages, number of children, etc.) was preferred; and, where feelings, tastes, attitudes and opinions were studied, it was through their purported external and observable manifestations. For example, the “query” that Charles Darwin disseminated among missionaries and other overseas informants – to collect information for his book, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) – equated emotions with observable physical facial expressions.⁸⁸ Darwin noted, for example, that:

The expression of grief, due to the contraction of the grief-muscles, is by no means confined to Europeans, but appears to be common to all the races of mankind. … two observers answer my query in the affirmative, but enter into no details.⁸⁹

However, emotions were not merely skin deep for Darwin: he also warned that private meanings and experiences were generally not amenable to scientific study. In English Men of Science: their nature and nurture (1874), Francis Galton (Darwin’s half-cousin) asked contemporary “men of science” about their family background (looking for hereditary traits) and their views on religion. He gathered material by “sending circular questions,” but Darwin’s response was blunt: he told Galton that it “is so impossible for any one to judge about his own character that George [Darwin’s son] first wrote several of the answers about myself, but I have adopted only those which seem to me true.” ⁹⁰

In the late nineteenth century, there was an interest in whether questionnaires could prevent subjectivities from influencing data collection. For some, the questionnaire seemed to prevent researcher bias by dissociating the moment of collection from the activities of analysis and comparison. The role of the respondent, as the U.S. psychologist Joshua Royce wrote approvingly in 1891, should be construed “not as scientific generalizer, but as observing naturalist, as collector of mental facts.”⁹¹ It was also thought that the basic structure of the questionnaire might prevent respondents from engaging in judgements. In its choppy, question-and-answer assembly, the questionnaire disrupted the flow of narrative; it seemingly produced a textual genre that opposed narrative-description, autobiography and analysis.⁹²

Paradoxically, this stop-start structure also offered an opening for studying subjectivities scientifically. In 1899, Magnus Hirschfeld drew on these anti-narrative dynamics to frame his ground-breaking sexology questionnaire as an “objective” way of collecting self-reported sexual desires. His was one of several early attempts at using questionnaires to study subjectivities. Max Weber’s questionnaire about industrial conditions, which he prepared for the Verein für Sozialpolitik in 1907, constituted a reimagining of the dynamics of factory labour to include the attitudes of workers. As Robert Brain has argued, Weber’s contemporaries often studied industrial workers as if they were machines, treating mental-related phenomena like fatigue and reaction time in mechanical terms.⁹³ In contrast, Weber believed that conditions in factories were shaped by “cultural existence as a whole.” His questionnaire directed at workers themselves reflected a different ontology: one that included the personal views and opinions of workers, not just their physical bodies, as information pertinent to the understanding of factory conditions.⁹⁴ Two decades later, the U.S. psychologist Louis Thurstone was still pushing the discipline of psychology to focus questionnaires more on people’s opinions rather than on traditional “psychophysical” topics, which were, he argued, “on the whole, rather trivial”:

Instead of asking a person, ‘Which of these two little cylinders is the heavier?’ … we might as well ask him something interesting, such as, ‘Which of these two nationalities do you in general prefer to associate with?’ or, ‘Which of these two offenses do you consider to be in general the more serious?’ or, ‘Which of these two pictures or colored designs do you like better?’⁹⁵

Between the two World Wars, the use of opinion questionnaires increased dramatically, contributing to the making of an “attitudinal public.”⁹⁶ In Britain, interest in the attitudes of “the man on the street” – a phrase popularized at this time – prompted three Cambridge University graduates to set up (in 1937) the ongoing research project “Mass Observation,” which sent open-ended question lists (“directives”) to ordinary “Observers” of “everyday life.”⁹⁷ The darker side of the “Everyman” was uncovered by exiled German sociologist and polymath Theodor Adorno and his colleagues at The University of California. They developed the “F Scale” with the aim of identifying psycho-social pathologies underpinning “antidemocratic trends” and the consequent appeal of fascism. Published as part of The Authoritarian Personality (1950), this scale drew upon the responses to “some 2000 questionnaires.”⁹⁸

(3) Thinking about respondents, informants and citizens

Anxieties about the expertise, character and truthfulness of respondents is another theme on which opinions and approaches changed dramatically from the nineteenth to twentieth century. In 1838, a “Report” of the Manchester Statistical Society cautioned that “It is impossible to expect accuracy in returns obtained by circulars, various constructions being put upon the same question by different individuals, who consequently classify their replies upon various principles.”⁹⁹ Typical nineteenth-century English and German titles of questionnaires (manual, instructions, Vorschläge, Ratschläge, Anleitung) suggest that these documents did more than solicit information: they also sought to guide the observations of respondents.¹⁰⁰ Some, like Degérando, hoped the rigour of questionnaires might produce the “philosophical traveller,” who could make more systematic observations.¹⁰¹ Over the nineteenth century, however, there were increasing doubts about the reliability of the observations of travellers; instead, there was a preference for soliciting responses from individuals with existing local expertise. In 1831, the astronomer and natural philosopher John Herschel put it this way:

It is obvious, too, that all the information that can possibly be procured, and reported, by the most enlightened and active travellers, must fall infinitely short of what is to be obtained by individuals actually resident upon the spot. Travellers, indeed, may make collections, may snatch a few hasty observations … but the resident alone can make continued series of regular observations.¹⁰²

This view, together with increasing linguistic demands, meant that missionaries, who typically lived among foreigners the longest, were highly valued and comprised a significant proportion of informants to any ethnographic questionnaire.¹⁰³

Catherine Marsh has usefully suggested a tripartite classification of respondent types: “informants” (who answer about or on behalf of others), “respondents” (who answer about themselves) and “citizens” (“whose attitudes are not just of scientific curiosity but of important political significance”).¹⁰⁴ There is a loose chronology to these types in so far as they mapped onto changing attitudes about social groups. Until the twentieth century, people without political or economic power, such as the working poor and colonial subjects, were typically studied via informants who answered questionnaires from their observations and experiences. Sometimes the assessment of trustworthy respondents was also gendered; though not always in ways we might expect. In around 1840, for example, the Mayor of Manchester suggested that wives were broadly more trustworthy respondents than husbands:

The husband can rarely furnish any statements in detail; it is better in nearly all cases to apply to the wife. She has her character, however, as an economical manager at stake, and requires cross-examining to elicit the exact expenditure.¹⁰⁵

Should a researcher in Britain at the time choose to survey poor people directly (that is, rather than requesting data from authorities and officials such as police, landlords, factory commissioners), then the results could be dismissed.¹⁰⁶

Distributing self-administered questionnaires among workers in the nineteenth century was potentially a radical act. In 1880, Karl Marx compiled a questionnaire – which he entitled an “Enquête Ouvrière,” though he also referred to it in correspondence as a “Questionneur” [sic?]¹⁰⁷ – with the aim of educating those workers who responded about their circumstances. It contained, he explained, the “hundred … most important” questions about the position of workers at the time and gave weight and authority to the respondent’s own judgement. The “Enquête Ouvrière” asks, for instance: “71. Have you noticed, in your personal experience, a bigger rise in the price of immediate necessities, e.g., rent, food, etc., than in wages?” In his preamble, Marx explained that the worker “alone can describe with full knowledge the misfortunes from which they suffer.” Far from supporting existing power structures (as Auden imagined), Marx, Weber and others regarded the empiricism of the questionnaire as a challenge to the status quo: it documented the views of workers who might not otherwise be heard.

Marx’s questionnaire also showed a clear pedagogical aim. While few of the questions were explicitly divisive, the overall structure attempted to encourage the worker, question by question, to reflect on the inequality and injustice of his or her circumstances:

48. In the event of a breach of agreement, what penalty can be inflicted on the employer, if he is the cause of the breach?

49. What penalty can be inflicted on the worker if he is the cause of the breach?

One question also tried to suggest analytical tools with which to evaluate and measure the fairness of economic situations:

75. Compare the price of the commodities you manufacture or the services you render with the price of your labour.¹⁰⁸

Marx reportedly distributed 25,000 copies and made repeated pleas for responses, but received few replies.¹⁰⁹ In 1936, Hilde Weiss pointed to several causes for Marx’s failure, including low literacy and the cumbersome length of the questionnaire. She also diagnosed a certain circular logic: Marx's questionnaire had to create the conditions in which one could undertake a questionnaire-inquiry (Enquête).¹¹⁰ Thus the success of the “Enquête Ouvrière,” which aimed to awaken workers to their circumstance, depended on respondents who were, to a significant degree, sufficiently class-aware to collect data on class. Viewed through the archive of responses – or lack of responses – the history of the questionnaire is largely a story of failures until the twentieth century. Over that century we had to learn to answer – even to learn to love to answer – questionnaires.¹¹¹

Taking opinions seriously did not necessarily mean empowering this new type of citizen-respondent. In the 1930s, questionnaire practitioners were divided over whether individuals were authorities about themselves. Paul Lazarsfeld, the first director of Colombia University’s Bureau of Applied Social Research, highlighted the limits of our self-reporting to refine questioning techniques, sparking a whole industry in marketing surveys targeted at consumer opinions. Similarly, others demonstrated the need to supplement self-reported data with independent observations of actual behaviour.¹¹² On the other hand, a range of self-help questionnaires with links to psychology empowered us to collect and interpret our own data. Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers laboured to give people a deeper understanding of their own “personality.” Believing that self-administered attitudinal questionnaires can help us know ourselves, they instrumentalized Carl Jung’s theory of personality types into lists of A-or-B type questions about one’s personal feelings, attitudes and preferences (e.g. “Do you prefer to (a) eat to live, or (b) live to eat”) that would become the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.¹¹³

5. Concluding points

As a member of the class of documents that Samuel Pepys referred to in 1660 as “a form,” the questionnaire has taken many forms, albeit retaining its identity as a set of questions seeking information.¹¹⁴ There has been a variety of formats: the number of questions; the presence or absence of question marks and item numbers; the prescribed mode of response, such as prose, the filling in of blank cells or the selection (by ticking) from multiple-choice responses. Issues relating to format, and their attendant assumptions, have persisted across different media (manuscript, print, typescript, electronic document) over the last 500 years.¹¹⁵ Nevertheless, the shock of Judith Kaplan’s article in this issue is instructive: she shows how a desire in the late-nineteenth century for post-philological fieldwork methods in the study of colour senses – based on the act of pointing to things rather than analysing texts – resulted in “questionnaires without words.” In such moments, we might well ask whether the questionnaire is being superseded or transformed? Will the impact of digital technologies erase the questionnaire together with older information tools such as the dictionary, encyclopaedia, library catalogue and index card?¹¹⁶ Or is the questionnaire method so elementary – a logical extension of the basic human activity of asking questions – that its form will endure in new digital skins?

The contributors to this special issue explore the questionnaire as an idea, a text, an object, a practice and a method. In terms of subject matter, there is a focus on the physical and social sciences, including natural history and natural philosophy (Margaret Schotte and Richard Yeo), psychology and sociology (Geertje Mak and Eric Hounshell) and linguistics (Judith Kaplan). In terms of geographical scope, there is a concentration on northern Europe; however, the articles demonstrate the global dimensions of the history of questionnaires. Eric Hounshell asserts the Viennese origins of purportedly “American” surveying methods; and Margaret Schotte and Judith Kaplan highlight the appeal of questionnaires as a means of coordinating data collection at vast distances, beyond European borders.

Anchored in different disciplines, the articles which follow examine how the operation of questionnaires has been affected by the assumptions that structure the inquiry. For example, “queries” in early modern sciences were mainly associated with the collection of preliminary empirical information rather than with the testing of theories. In the late 1600s, as Margaret Schotte explains, waterwerk journals on ships of the Dutch East India Company were designed to instruct sailors to observe particular variables regarding the onboard distillation of water and record it in pre-formatted columns. The aim was to gather uniform data for comparison and analysis. Lists of queries issued by the early Royal Society had a similar rationale; but one complication, as Richard Yeo’s discussion of the young Isaac Newton’s notebook reveals, is that some queries could approximate hypotheses. This option was deliberately postponed in the emerging social sciences of the late nineteenth century: on positivistic principles, open-ended empirical questionnaires aimed at amassing data at scale, independent of theory. However, from the 1920s, scholars increasingly framed questionnaires to support or contest current theories founded on existing data; and this engendered fears that existing disciplinary knowledge and conventions were embodied in any given questionnaire in ways that predetermined responses. Was the questionnaire thus too inflexible and unsuited to the study of new phenomena, even though this was precisely the role of queries, inquiries and interrogatories in the early modern period?

The consequences of this question are broached by the articles here on modern questionnaires. Eric Hounshell considers how Paul Lazarsfeld and his contemporaries in Red Vienna attempted to reconcile, as they saw it, the fixedness of a written questionnaire (which supported their quest for stable concepts amenable to quantification and induction) with their belief that disciplinary concepts were constructed and contingent, and so needed to be challenged and tested during research. According to Hounshell, the expert interviewer thus emerged as an exemplar for social scientists like Lazarsfeld, who adjusted pre-prepared questions in relation to the answers of subjects. Simultaneously, each questionnaire came to represent merely a tentative model that could be continually changed and updated during a project in response to “pre-testing.” This example suggests that the questionnaire could serve, alternatively, as an independent and dependent variable; sometimes within the life of a single scientific project. Geertje Mak argues that historians should not only attend to how questionnaires predetermine information but also consider how questionnaires reflect ideas about the kinds of data that can be collected. The intimate personal questions in Magnus Hirschfeld’s standardized questionnaire overthrew previous disciplinary conventions by making visible and available to sexologists the self-reported feelings of the patient. This case also highlights a paradox of social science questionnaires: responding to Hirschfeld’s questions shaped the ways in which people understood their own sexuality and gender. From the 1930s, critics of the questionnaire such as Auden urged the need to consider these ontological dimensions; namely, how the formulation and application of questionnaires might constitute the reality being studied and define the types of knowledge considered important.

Acknowledgements

The editors thank the following people for helpful comments on this Editorial: Dario Di Rosa, Michael Harbsmeier, Martin Herrnstadt, Judith Kaplan and Anne Kwaschik. We are also grateful to the anonymous referees of the five articles, and to James Lancaster, the special issues editor at IHR.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Daniel Midena

Daniel Midena is lecturer in history at the University of the South Pacific (Fiji) and an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Queensland (Australia).

Richard Yeo

Richard Yeo is an historian of science and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He is Emeritus Professor at Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia.

Notes

1 Auden, Collected Poems, 259–63, at 262. See Mendelson, Early Auden, Later Auden, 574–6 for the poem’s support of followers of Hermes (subjective, prolific) over those of Apollo (objective, official). In an earlier poem, “The Unknown citizen” (March 1939), Auden indicted public opinion surveys for their reduction of the individual to a position on a statistical graph (Auden, Collected Poems, 201).

2 Ware, “The Answer to Those who Ask Another”, section 4, 4; quoted in Dennis, “The Edison Questionnaire”, 24, also 36–7 for Thomas Edison’s “general information” test of 1921 and the controversy it instigated. See also Wilson, “Question of Questionnaires”.

3 Effects of Strategic Bombing, vol. 1, 2–3.

4 See Spender, “Introduction”, vii.

5 But see Dictionnaire historique, vol. 2, 1688, col. 2, under “Question” for questionnaire in its modern sense from c. 1845.

6 Fowler, Modern English Usage, 496.

7 Boring, “When and How to Reply to a Questionary”. Boring (1886–1968) wrote the landmark work A History of Experimental Psychology (1929).

8 Blair et al., Information.

9 Ghobrial, “Networks”, 96.

10 On the concept of lists, see Keller, “Lists”.

11 See “Queries of the Statistical Society”, 11–13; Urry, “ Notes and Queries on Anthropology”, 45–6.

12 Schrire, “Ethnographic Questionnaires”, 201; Kvideland and Sehmsdorf, Nordic folklore, viii.

13 Gault, “History of the Questionnaire”, 374, 376.

14 Cole, Surveying the Avant-Garde, 24, on the Berlin Monthly’s “What is Enlightenment?”, answered by Immanuel Kant in 1784.

15 Vande Kemp, “Dream Journals”, 39–40; also Kwaschik, Der Griff nach dem Weltwissen.

16 Gault, “History of the Questionnaire”.

17 Lazarsfeld, “Notes”, 33.

18 Puccini, “Introduzione”; also Blanckaert, Le Terrain des Sciences Humaines.

19 Kindley, Questionnaire, 4. Of course, informants and respondents have usually received pre-formatted forms; for example, with tabular columns, numbered questions or instructions. See Gitelman, Paper Knowledge, 21–3, 36 (for “nonblanks”).

20 Lawn, Rise and Decline.

21 For “bookish” as a derogatory adjective, see Locke, Essay, II. xiii. 28. On the influence of travel experience in the challenge to authority, see Hazard, The European Mind, 5–12.

22 On the debates about this concept, see Wootton, The Invention of Science.

23 Parker, Grand Strategy; see also Burke, Social History, 119; Head, “Records, Secretaries”; Dover, Information Revolution, 124–30.

24 Although the scale of Philip II’s project was remarkable, aspects of his method echoed the earlier parish surveys conducted by the Roman Catholic Church. Burke, Social History, 120–2.

25 Parker, Grand Strategy, 61–5; on the use of “question lists”, see Brendecke, Empirical Empire, 216–26.

26 Cline, “The Relaciones Geográficas”, 344–8.

27 Ibid., 347–8.

28 Translated in Cline, “Relaciones Geográficas”, 363–71. For the information overload these requests engendered, see Parker, Grand Strategy, 65–6.

29 See “Instructions of Philip II to Dr. Francisco Hernández”, in Varey, The Mexican Treasury, 46.

30 Bouza, Communication, 82 (n. 5).

31 Bacon, “Great Instauration preliminaries”, 13. See also Jardine, Scenes of Inquiry, on specific questions as constituting fields of scientific research.

32 On both lifetime and long-term inquiry, see Yeo, “Hippocrates’ Complaint”.

33 Bacon, Works, vol. 2, 11, for a list of six such histories.

34 Bacon, Instauratio magna, Book 1, at 171 (aphorism 112).

35 Bacon, Parasceve, 475–85.

36 Ibid., 473 (aphorism 10).

37 The French scholar and antiquarian Nicolas Fabri de Peiresc (1580–1637) drew up lists of people to be consulted. See Miller, Peiresc’s Mediterranean World, 265–71; Goldgar, Impolite Learning; and, for a later period, Schaffer et al., Brokered World.

38 Shalev, “Travel”, 820–7.

39 See, for example, “Inquiries for Turky”. For a consolidation of this approach, see Woodward, Brief Instructions. For Robert Boyle’s contribution, see Hunter, “Boyle and the Early Royal Society”.

40 Robert Hooke advocated the circulation of “Instructions (to Seamen and Travellers) to shew them what is pertinent and considerable, to be observ’d in their Voyages and Abodes, and how to make their Observations and keep Registers or Accounts of them”. Hooke, “The Preface”, sig. (a) 2^r.

41 Dampier, New Voyage, sig. A2^r–v.

42 Fox, “Printed Questionnaires”, 616–17; see Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS. Top. Devon b. 1–2 for the replies. See also Yale, Sociable Knowledge, 95–6.

43 More, Apology (1533), ch. 45, 147. More was agreeing with the English lawyer Christopher St. German (1460–1540); see Kelly, “Thomas More”, 847, 875.

44 Durrant, Witchcraft, 255–62.

45 Brendecke, Empirical Empire, 226–34.

46 Stagl, History of Curiosity, 30–2, 57–65; Rubiés, “Instructions”; Carey, “Inquiries”.

47 Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy, 108–18; de Vivo, Information, 53–63.

48 Profitable instructions.

49 Ibid., 2. See also [Howell], Instructions.

50 [Hartlib], Hartlib His Legacie. Hartlib’s family were German but he was born in Elbing, in the western region of Poland; he emigrated to England in c. 1628 and died there in 1662; see Greengrass, Leslie, and Raylor, Hartlib.

51 Fox, Printed Questionnaires”, 595–6; on Boate, see Barnard, “Hartlib circle”.

52 Boate, “Annotations”, comprises extracts from letters and comments (albeit not directly on the “Interrogatory”), which suggest that respondents were likely to answer only questions that touched on their interests and experience.

53 Phillips, New World of English Words. For an example of contemporary usage (cited in OED), see Pepys, Diary, 17 November 1660: “I inquired at the Privy Seal Office for a form for a nobleman to make one his Chaplin. But I understanding that there is not any, I did draw up one”.

54 Chambers, Cyclopaedia, vol. 1, “Formulary”. Especially in religious contexts, there was a close connection between formularies and rules, as in “the Rule of St. Benedict” (Cyclopaedia, vol. 2, “Rule”).

55 [Copland], The questionary of Cyrurgyens, verso of title page: “this lytell questyonary & formulary … haue ben often requyred and soughte for”.

56 Kassell, “Casebooks”, 609, 599.

57 “Logbook” derives from the “log-board”, a “hinged pair of boards on which the particulars of a ship’s log are noted for transcription into the log-book”. See OED, which dates this term to 1669, and “log book” to 1679.

58 Schotte, “Distilling Water, Distilling Data”, in this issue; see also Schotte, Sailing School.

59 See also Yeo, Notebooks, for adjustments of the commonplace book to record empirical information.

60 Hooke’s “scheme” is reproduced in Sprat, History, 173–9. See also Daston, “Empire of Observation”, 89–91.

61 Soll, Information Master, 19–20, 67–9; also Rule and Trotter, A World of Paper.

62 Harbsmeier, “Prehistory of Ethnography”, 25.

63 “Ethnological Information Desired”, 283–7.

64 Hess and Mendelsohn, “Case and Series”, 291–6. See also Mendelsohn, “Empiricism in the Library”.

65 Abbott, “Collective Investigation”, 688–9. For an earlier reference to “the circulation of printed skeleton forms”, see Herschel, Discourse, 134.

66 Degérando, Observation, 63.

67 Notes and Queries on Anthropology; Urry, “Notes and Queries”; Stocking, “The Ethnographer’s Magic”.

68 See Battaglia, Grande Dizionario, vol. 15, 124, under “Questionario,” which cites volume 31 (1882) of Bartolomeo Veratti’s Opuscoli Religiosi, Letterari e Morali.

69 Furetière, Dictionnaire universel; Dictionnaire de l’Academie française.

70 Before the 1870s, German speakers regularly used several terms for question lists: Fragstück, Ratschläge, Formblatt. The term Fragebogen did not enter Duden (the preeminent German dictionary since the start of the twentieth century) until the mid-1900s, but it frequently appeared in German social scientific literature in the late 1800s.

71 Murray et al., A New English Dictionary, vol. 8 (1914), 48: “Questionary: a list of questions; a treatise in the form of questions; a catechism”. From the 1400s, “questionary” also denoted the person putting questions.

72 “Anthropological Notes”, 345, col. 3. A New English Dictionary, vol. 8 (1914) quotes a fragment of this passage.

73 Murray et al., Oxford English Dictionary … Supplement, vol. 13, 152, col. 1.

74 Verhandlungen der ersten Hauptversammlung, 94; also Echterhölter, “Shells and Order”.

75 Quoted in Young, “Thinking in Multitudes”, 167.

76 Stephan, “History of Uses”.

77 Igo, Averaged American, 135–46; Heath, “Globalization of Public Opinion Research”.

78 For pertinent analysis that appeared while this issue was in press, see Daston, Rules.

79 Quoted in Stieda, “Enquete”, 246.

80 Malinowski, Crime and Custom, ix–x.

81 Frake, “Notes on Queries in Ethnography”, 132.

82 Webb and Webb, Methods of Social Study, 68–82.

83 Ibid., 68.

84 Ibid., 69, 71.

85 Ibid., 73.

86 Sollors, “Everybody Gets Fragebogened”.

87 Porter, “Thin Description”, 226.

88 White, “Darwin’s Emotions”.

89 Darwin, Expression of the Emotions, 187.

90 Galton, Memories of My Life, 292; Darwin to Galton, 28 May 1873, via https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk.

91 Cited in Young, “Thinking in Multitudes”, 165.

92 Zimmerman, Anthropology and Antihumanism, 54–5.

93 Brain, “Ontology of the Questionnaire”, 660.

94 Quoted in Ibid., 651–2.

95 Thurstone, “Measurement of Social Attitudes”, 250.

96 Young, “Numbering the Mind”, 33, and 36–7 on Thurstone’s measurement and scaling of attitudes.

97 Calder, “Mass-Observation”; Harrison, “Observing”, 234; Jardine, “Mass-Observation”.

98 Adorno et al., Authoritarian Personality, xi, xiv, 23–5. This volume was part of the “studies in Prejudice” series edited by Max Horkheimer and Samuel H. Flowerman.

99 “Report of a Committee”, 303.

100 See Rubiés, “Instructions”; Harbsmeier, “Fieldwork avant la lettre”.

101 Degérando, Observation, 63.

102 Herschel, Discourse, 349–350. For projects on a global scale, see Bourguet, Licoppe, and Sibum, Instruments, Travel; Naylor and Schaffer, “Nineteenth-Century Survey Sciences”.

103 Morgan, Systems of Consanguinity, viii–ix.

104 Marsh, “Informants”, 206.

105 Quoted in Cole, “Continuity and Institutionalization”, 83; Smith, “Note on Stability”.

106 Marsh, “Informants”, 208, 213.

107 Weiss, “Die Enquête Ouvrière”, 76.

108 Marx, “The Workers’ Inquiry”.

109 Weiss, “Die Enquête Ouvrière”, 76, n. 1.

110 Ibid., 87–88.

111 Kindley, Questionnaire, 7

112 LaPiere, “Attitudes vs Actions”.

113 Quoted in Kindley, Questionnaire, 43; on how this and other popular psychology questionnaires generated the notion of “personality”, see Emre, What’s Your Type?

114 The questionnaire demands analysis as a paper technology in the spirit of scholarship on the notebook, index card and laboratory report. See, for example, Holmes, Renn, and Rheinberger, Reworking the Bench; Blair, Too Much to Know; Krajewski, Paper Machines; Yeo, Notebooks.

115 See Gitelman, Paper Knowledge.

116 Sepkoski, “Database before the Computer?”