The article comments on an article about the Detroit Area Study. As a pedagogy of data collection, the Detroit Area Study was really quite efficient, in spite of the many student-hours consumed. True apprenticeship in a research institute would have required many more hours without a proportionately greater benefit. University lecture and reading courses, on the other hand, are very badly adapted to teaching such skills. The ratio of costs to benefits may be unacceptable to a sociology department, however, even when it is acceptable or desirable to many students. A student's investment of time is limited to part of a year or two, but a department may have to mount a different full-scale study every year. Data collection might well be taught through projects in evaluation or market research, or others in which the role of theory is reduced. In fact, this is probably a superior pedagogy for survey technique alone. Yet part of the value in the Detroit Area Study lay precisely in the nasty confrontation of survey method with sociological problems. No matter how favorable the cost/benefit ratio, the cost may simply be too great for many departments to bear. Sociology is ill served by researchers innocent of any disciplined training in data collection.
