Paul Lazarsfeld

An unemployed village

in: Character and personality. An international quarterly of psychodiagnostics and allied studies (London), 1. Bd., Nr. 2 (Dezember 1932), S. 147–151.

Die Veröffentlichung auf dieser Website erfolgt mit freundlicher Genehmigung von Lotte Bailyn, Belmont (Massachusetts), und Robert Lazarsfeld, Ann Arbor (Michigan). Beachten Sie das Copyright!

147

An unemployed village

Paul Lazarsfeld

Psychological Institute, Industrial Psychology Research Station, Vienna

In Vienna we have attempted to represent the psychological aspect of unemployment by the methods of modern research. To this end we collected, over a period of three months, all the available material relating to the conditions of life among the inhabitants of Marienthal, a village of Lower Austria.

Marienthal is a village of 1500 inhabitants, all of whom formerly lived by working in an large textile factory. The factory has now been closed down for three years, so that the entire population is without work, with the exception of eighty persons, some of whom are engaged in the process of liquidation, while others have obtained work in the neighbourhood.

The lack of sociographical experience in Europe compelled us to invent and to test for ourselves most of the methods of collecting material. The results of the inquiry will be published shortly by Dr. Marie Jahoda-Lazarsfeld and Dr. Hans Keisl [recte Hans Zeisl; Anm. R.M.], who have received valuable aid, in preparing them for publication, from Dr. Lotte Danziger.

From this report I now wish to single out three things:

1.) The methods by which we collected the material,

2.) A statement which summarizes a great part of the results, and

3.) A few examples which adequately confirm and illustrate the above statement.

1.

In collecting the material it had to be borne in mind that it was necessary to avoid in injuring the susceptibilities of the distressed population, that psychological self-observations cannot be expected of working-class people, and that any report must contain as many exact data as possible. In compliance with these requirements, our collaborators in Marienthal could not be permitted to make their appearance as reporters, but had to be brought into touch with the

148

population by the exercise of some practical function. To this end we made a number of arrangements which were carried out by the ten psychologists who were cooperating with us. For example, we collected clothing in Vienna, and distributed it in Marienthal at Christmas; but before we distributed it a lady collaborator went from house to house, asking what were the most urgent needs of each individual household, and in this way we obtained a first and willingly vouchsafed insight into the general domestic conditions of these households. To the same end we organized a sewing-class, a gymnastic class, an ambulance, and an advisory education centre, and we even sent students of different political convictions to act as organizing officials in the various political groups.

Finally, then, we had the following material at our disposal: the already existing data of the communal officials, the coöperative [!] shops, the library, etc.; the reports which the leading officials of the locality based upon their own observations; the results of direct contact with the population, in the form of written records of conversations, encounters in the workers’ home, domestic incidents, etc., and also in the form of diaries, denunciations to the police, etc., and the replies of systematic lists of queries as to the employment of time and money, and the meals consumed.

The difficulties of obtaining material may be realized from the following example:

We received contradictory reports as to what food the children took to school with them for lunch. We therefore compiled our own lunch statistics, and it then appeared that during the first few days after the payment of unemployment relief the parents gave the children a relatively large amount of food to take to school, and thus simply had to let them go hungry during the days preceding the next payment of relief. This not merely explained the contradictory nature of the reports, but also revealed a characteristic irrationality in the housekeeping of the unemployed.

Of our organizations the sewing-class was especially popular among the women, and the keeping of housekeeping accounts was especially unpopular. After some time we decided to continue the sewing-class only in return for a promise to produce housekeeping-books, which yielded us valuable material.

In all cases where we assumed that the inventories of meals were intended to make matters look particularly black, we got the doctor to remonstrate with the mother in question for ill-treating her children; she always protested, alluding to her management of her household, and the comparison with the data previously given enabled us to ascertain the actual state of affairs.

149

 2.

If one were to attempt to summarize the result of the inquiry in a formula, it might be worded as follow: The psychologists finds that in spite of the extraordinarily low economic standard of life of the unemployed persons whose conditions we investigated, no actual deroute has yet occurred. This indicates that parallel with the narrowing of the economic scope of these people, their psychic life has contracted; a narrowing of the psychological sphere of wants occurs, so that the pressure of external conditions is not felt in its full force. We defined this psychic attitude as resignation, and to describe it in its various forms is one of the principal objects of our inquiry. Yet it may be shown, from our material, that this contraction of wants has a limit which cannot be exceeded. If it is reached, and if the external pressure continues to increase, the result is a catastrophic physical and psychic collapse.

We will now give a few examples and illustrations of each point of the above statement.

The economic situation is best characterized by the following three figures: The population of Marienfeld [recte Marienthal; Anm. R.M.] are living, on the average, on one Austrian schilling (fivepence [!]) a day; seventy per cent of the population eat meat at most once a week, and, as a general thing, by meat horseflesh is to be understood. Fifty per cent of the suppers consist of nothing but coffee and a little bread. The progressive worsening of the economic situation which has to be reckoned with results from the nature of the unemployment relief, which is gradually decreased with the duration of unemployment.

The phenomenon of resignation is measured above all by the general impression of apathy and hopelessness produced upon an observer in Marienthal. In particular cases it may be characterized by a few data. The children, for example, wrote lists of what they would like at Christmas, and a methodical examination of these lists yielded useful information, since their schools were attended also by children from villages in which there was not such a degree of unemployment. A comparison shows that the total value of the things desired by these other children amounted, on the average, to four Austrian schillings, while the value of the things desired by the Marienthal children was only 1 schilling 50.¹ The lists of the Marienthal children contain far more subjunctive clauses than the others.

150

Among the young people it is characteristic that only those who have been apprenticed give expression to concrete plans for the future, while others speak of their future only in general phrases.

Among the adults resignation is perhaps best characterized by their present attitude toward politics, which in former times constituted the central point of public intellectual life. The people do not read the newspaper, even when they receive it gratis, and they resign from their political organizations, even when no member’s subscription is demanded, and they no longer debate with one another in the sparsely attended meetings. It is as though the need of conflict had been reduced from the level of the political group to a lower stratum, for the number of personal denunciations which the people make against one another increases from year to year.

Even the only new thing which the present state of affairs has brought the unemployed proves to be a delusive gift: namely, time. The people do not know what to do with the surplus of time on their hands; they even discontinue their former activities, for example, the number of books borrowed from the free library has diminished by fifty per cent. The extremely interesting manner in which the unemployed experience time cannot be treated here in detail. The people lose the sense of the fixed points by which we commonly reckon time; they become unpunctual, and can no longer give any account of how they pass their time; time has suffered an economic depreciation, but since, owing to the unemployment legislation the trade union tradition still persists, one often notes a very curious twofold reckoning of time.

The attitude of resignation, as our statement proceeds to note, is a temporary phase. As an example offered by the dynamic interpretation of our material, I give the following data:

With the aid of a large number of criteria, it is possible to refer each individual inhabitant of Marienthal to one of these attitude-groups, which we have defined as follows:

Unbroken: that is, those who still think optimistically, make all sorts of attempts to improve their position, and in various ways give thought to the future.

Resigned: that is, those who have so far reduced their claims that they can just endure the presents state of affairs; they are entirely dependent on the maintenance of the present legislation.

Broken individuals are those who have given up the race, are heedless of the future as of the present, and sooner or later will be forced in one way or another to leave the community.

151

It will now be seen that inclusion in one of these three groups is in the closest correlation with the still available income: The following table gives in the first column the percentage of the population which according to our statement falls into each of the attitude groups in question, and in the second column the average monthly income.

Since the progressive decrease of material supplies is unavoidable, the table enables us to foresee a psychic collapse.

A similar table may be drawn up to show the physical condition. Our medical collaborators have grouped the children in accordance with the system usual in Austria: Group I containing the healthy children, and Group III the physically infirm children, while II constitutes a medium group. In the following table the second column gives the percentage distribution, and the third column the percentage of the members of the family who are still working somewhere:

Thus, with increasing unemployment a physical decline is to be expected.

It is proposed that our inquiry should constitute the starting-point of a series of similar undertakings, which would ascertain the different variations of unemployment. In particular, it will presumably be possible to obtain more comprehensive results where the whole community is not unemployed, but where the unemployed are living in close juxtaposition to unemployed workers. In any case, however, we think it to be the task of the psychologist to contribute by such investigations material which will elucidate the most urgent problem of the present time.

1 The radius of the circle of their wishes, so to speak, has diminished by one-third.