The Importance of Questionnaire Surveys in Social Anthropology

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People were using social anthropology and questionnaire surveys, you said. What sort of things were going wrong in your view or going off track? Oh, well, social anthropologists were focusing very much on the issues and the concepts and the mindsets and categories which they had learned from university training. So that was something very much to be got over. And I think on the whole it was quite successful to liberate social anthropologists from the slavery of the fixed categories and concepts that they had been taught.

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What is the field of development? What are the differences between rapid and participatory rural appraisal? Under what conditions should qualitative surveys be preferred over quantitative and vice versa? What is participatory mapping? How has the field of development changed over the last few decades? Why do people get taller when sanitation improves?

Robert Chambers is a British academic and development practitioner. He spent his academic career at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex. In 2013, he became an honorary fellow of the International Institute of Social Studies. He has been one of the leading advocates for putting the poor, destitute, and marginalized at the center of the processes of development policy since the 1980s. Learn more about him here.

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