Strix
Pouffes Don't Count
HE ultimate disadvantage [of the results of quantitative social research] is that they have little appeal to the popular reader and are thus unsaleable.' This some- what wistful note is struck by Dr. Dennis Chapman in the preface to The Home and Social Status, which was published the other day by Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd. in the Inter- national Library of Sociology and Social Reconstruction, and costs 35s. The words acted as a challenge. One has read pre- faces in which authors described their books as humble, modest, inconsequential or unpretentious; in many cases it would have been much nearer the truth to call them unsaleable, but I never remember this term actually being used. Earlier in the preface Dr. Chapman quotes the view of 'many influ- ential sociologists' that 'in no science is the pursuit of objective knowledge more futile than in social science.' This is pre- sumably done to make sure that nobody will be such a fool as to suppose that the book, though perhaps rather heavy going, is worth while.
Dr. Chapman's object, as I imperfectly understand it, is to express social status in terms of linoleum, or possibly the other way round. Sometimes he is quite easy to follow; nothing could be more lucid and less controversial than such statements as 'the house is built primarily to provide shelter from the elements' or 'there appears to be a sharp contrast between the provision made for the child in the first year of its life and afterwards.' Passages like these build up suspense, causing us to wonder what is coming next.
What does come next is apt to be a bit abstruse, e.g., 'the procedures involve the assumption that social status is measur- able and can be regarded as a continuous variate. If this can be at least tentatively accepted, the method provides for a study of the effect of postulating a different distribution for "resultant status.' For example, research may show that, in the present economy, the distribution of status is positively skewed rather than normal.' As far as I can see, it is anybody's guess what this means. It is a relief to get back to terra firma and be told that 'horse riding has become an essential accomplishment for the girl in the upper middle classes, an interesting example of the process whereby the successful city dweller seeks to acquire status by adopting obsolete rural pursuits.' It is clear that Dr. Chapman does not give a damn what kind of review he gets, in Horse and Hound.
Occasionally his pages throb with human interest. In Table 69, for instance (`The Proportions of Middlesbrough People who would Choose to live amongst the Same and Different Groups of People to Those amongst whom they at Present Live'), it is heart-warming to discover that those who wish to live among the same kind of people vastly outnumber those who yearn for a change of milieu, and that far and away the commonest reason given for this wish was 'I like them, etc.' (May one venture to hope that in any future edition the 'etc.' will be omitted? It makes the revelation somehow less luminous.) Dr. Chapman has evolved a clever, but to me incompre- hensible, system of giving marks for social status and also—to chattels and furnishings—for performance, display and culture. This is what you score if you have the following objects in your living room :
Object Performance Display Culture Total Score
A Dining Suite .. 4 0 0 4 No Dining Suite* .. 7 0 0 7 A Television Set .. 4 2 3 9 No Radio .. 0 0 0 0 A Grand Piano .. 4 0 6 10 Any Other Piano or none .. .. 4 0 0 4 Flowers and Plants 3 1 2 6 No Flowers or Plants .. .. 3 0 0 3 There are a lot of things that puzzle me about these extracts from Table 44. Why does a grand piano get 0 for Display and why does no piano at all get 4 for Performance, which is the same as a Television Set gets? Why—but there is no time to ask questions while we still have the social gradations of curtains to consider; here, starting with straight-and-pelmet (tres snob, total score 8). we descend through straight-only- or-straight-and-valiance and net-and-straight-and-valiance-or- pelmet to net-only-or-net-and-straight. Already we have (have we not?) the feeling that we are getting somewhere.
Here and there one gains the impression that some of the occupants of the dwellings whose social status Dr. Chapman and his devoted field-workers were evaluating attempted to offer a resistance as vain as it was ill-co-ordinated. In a series of tables showing a comparison of the Different Types of Sew- ing.Machine (also Sideboard, Fireplace. Occasional Furniture, Radio, and so on) in the Main Living Room, we come suddenly on a laconic footnote to the table dealing with Ash-trays. In as many as 19 per 'cent. of the smallest houses this vital in- formation 'proved impossible to obtain from the informants' description in cases where access to the dwelling was not obtained.' My italics. And in Liverpool, for no stated reasons. forty-one families 'moved house during the survey.' They were tracked down and given a Mean Indices Score.
There is no record of any field-workers either becoming casualties or going native. Their standing orders (which Dr. Chapman has wisely printed in an appendix) lay down the detailed and rigid rules under which they may allotmarks for social status. Books, for instance, are very properly `classified by the width of shelf space occupied' and not by what sort of books they are. 'If only a few books (three or more) are to be found lying about the room, this counts as under 6 feet.' So don't fool yourself that you will improve your position in society by having a single copy of War and Peace negligently disposed upon the pouffe (or pouffe, as Dr. Chapman calls it in a stern warning to his minions that it does not count as Occasional Furniture).
Absorbing though in many ways it is, this book makes heavy demands upon the reader, and after grappling with it I must confess to feeling (if I may borrow one, of the author's happiest phrases) 'positively skewed rather than normal.' Be- fore going out to restore my energies at one of those Food Supplement Distribution Centres of which Table 93 gives us a tempting glimpse, it remains only to note one odd coinci- dence. If Beachcomber, or some other anti-social wag, had invented the researches of which I have attempted to give some account, it is at least an even chance that he would have described them as having been carried out in Bootle. A lot of Dr. Chapman's were.
* 'The absence of a dining-room suite in the living-room implies a separate room for eating, an arrangement of living associated with higher social status.' But it may also, surely, imply that you have flogged the stuff.
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