TOK - HUMAN SCIENCES

How valuable are questionnaires as a tool for producing knowledge in the human sciences?

Explore the resources below to understand how national census data is used to produce knowledge.

Read

Two texts · PDF
PDF APPROX. 4 MIN READ

The Most Boring Superpower on Earth

Why a statistical agency addresses its mail to a building rather than a person, and what happens to a national picture when only 61.3% of households answer. Introduces survey weighting as a judgment call.

Guiding questions
  • If two official poverty measures describe the same people in the same year, in what sense is either one true?
  • Weighting corrects for households the survey could not reach. What has to be assumed about them, and who decides?
PDF approx. 8 min read

The Science of Measuring People

What a personality test and a national census have in common: both have to operationalise something they cannot measure directly, then force messy human answers into categories. Covers informants, non-response bias, weighting, and why the data is not the world.

Guiding questions
  • If "employed" can mean forty hours or two, what exactly does an employment rate tell you?
  • Categories are useful because they simplify reality. What is lost, and when does the loss matter?
  • How much does the observer affect the observation when one person answers for a whole household?

Watch

Two videos · plays in the page
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How a Survey Measures National Inequality

How answers from a sample of households are scaled up into a claim about a whole country.

Guiding questions
  • At what step does a set of individual answers become knowledge about a population?
  • What does the instrument make visible, and what does it necessarily leave out?
Video {{ durA }}

Statistics vs Visual Data to measure poverty

Walks through the mechanics of turning household answers into an official poverty figure.

Guiding questions
  • Which decisions in the process are technical, and which are political?
  • What would a respondent have to know for their answer to be accurate?

Explore

External site · slides · PDF
Web dollarstreet.org

Dollar Street

Explore what visual data shows about poverty that a number cannot: photographs of homes around the world, organized by household income rather than by country.

Guiding questions
  • What do these pictures reveal that the data did not?
  • To what extent should pictures like this be considered measurable data?
PDF 12 slides

Measuring the Masses

Browse through this slide deck that explores how national household surveys turn moving, complex lives into fixed addresses, weighted formulas, and closed response categories. It traces one figure — a household earning $51-$142 a month — through that whole construction, ending on the claim that a census's limits are not mistakes but the tradeoffs required to build a valid view of the whole.

Guiding questions
  • The deck calls proxy reporting, rigid categories, and survey weighting "inherent tradeoffs" rather than flaws. Do you agree they're necessary, or are they still distortions?
  • If a census can only tell you a household earns $51-$142 a month, what does that number leave out that a photograph might show?