Measuring Morals: The Beginnings of the Social Survey Movement in Canada, 1913-1917

Abstract

During the 1910s a series of general surveys was conducted, primarily by an alliance of Methodists and Presbyterians whose primary target was the moral condition of the larger Anglo-Canadian cities. This paper explores the techniques employed and the underlying logic of these investigations by examining the implicit links between the different forms of data collected and published. These links reveal a distinctive construction of “moral danger” organized around the axes of urbanization and immigration viewed through the lens of temperance and an activist Protestantism.