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CHAPTER 9
The Adult and the Cinema
Strong counter-measures are indicated against theorists who damn the personal document with faint praise, saying that its sole merit lies in its capacity to yield hunches or to suggest hypotheses, or that the mental operations brought to bear upon the single case are merely a matter of incomplete and inadequate statistical reasoning. Although these points of view do reflect the prevailing empirical climate of our times, they fail to express more than a small part of the value of personal documents for social science. Properly used, such documents anchor a discipline in the bedrock of human experience, make the most of the predilective value of the single case in the normal process of human thought, exploit the ideographic principles of reasoning, and aid in meeting (more adequately than can unaided actuarial methods of work) the three critical tests of science: understanding, prediction, and control.
Gordon w. allport in The Use of Personal Documents in psychological Science, Social Research Council, New York 1942.
1. INTRODUCTORY
We began our studies of British adult audiences with unique advantages. Mr. Arthur Rank had given us facilities to visit any of the Odeon Cinemas in this country. We talked to managers, assistant managers, their secretarial staff, doormen, usherettes. Moreover, we sat amongst the audiences and we distributed questionnaires in theatres. The managers were almost without exception extremely helpful and there can be no doubt that if their experiences could be pooled audience reactions research would profit considerably.
All this gave us an invaluable background for forming a sociological appreciation of cinema audiences. In conjunction with those questionnaires which were distributed through the cinemas, we handed out the same questionnaires to people in all walks of life.
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