Herbert Blumer's critique of The Polish Peasant: A post mortem on the life history approach in sociology

Herbert Blumer's appraisal of William Thomas and Florian Znaniecki's Polish Peasant study and the panel discussion of Blumer's critique, sponsored by the Social Science Research Council in 1938, occasioned a discussion of the value of personal documents in social research which is indicative of the controversy surrounding their use in the interwar period. It is suggested that most sociologists writing in the 1930s were skeptical of the value of personal document research, because such research could not be conducted along the lines of experimental procedure in physical science. Personal document research was in decline by 1938. The critique and conference constituted a post mortem examination of this approach to social analysis.