| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public. By Sarah E. Igo. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007. x, 398 pp. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-674-02321-5.)
The Averaged American examines two seminal twentieth-century social science survey research projects (the Middletown studies and the Alfred C. Kinsey sexual behavior reports) and the development of the public opinion polling industry by George Gallup and Elmo Roper from the 1930s to the 1950s. Sarah E. Igo explores the practice of the research and the impact of that new form of "survey research" on the creation of a "mass public" in twentieth-century America. She writes the history of the research enterprises themselves with particular attention to the archival records of the projects, the polling organizations, and their leaders. She thus has a window to reveal the political, social, and ideological debates and assumptions behind the conception, execution, publication, and promotion of the research. This is a significant contribution to the literature on the history of the social survey.	1
Igo then looks at the impact of the studies in shaping how Americans understood themselves as "average" Americans. Robert Lynd, Helen Lynd, Kinsey, Gallup, and Roper held up mirrors to America, revealing the "private" and, in the case of the Kinsey reports, the "intimate," lives of people in new ways. This social science was widely reported in the popular press and magazine literature and permitted people to compare and evaluate their own opinions, attitudes, and behaviors against the reported statistical averages.	. . .

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