INTRODUCTION

The reports collected here give the results of various inquiries carried out by the Regional Organisation at different times between May and October 1942.

The inquiries were planned as separate pieces of work and they do not form a continuous whole. However, they all have a bearing on the same subject, the adaptations made by workers in industry and in the home to wartime conditions and their attitudes towards these conditions.

The first four reports “Working Women: Domestic Problems”; “Housewives’ Auxiliary Occupations”; “Working Men: Jobs Done at Home”; and “Shopping Difficulties”; all deal with the manner in which workers organise their industrial and domestic activities in relation to one another. Different groups of the population, wage-earning women, housewives, wage-earning men and the whole population respectively, are studied in these four inquiries.

Of the other reports, two, “Transport” and “Canteens” deal with specifically industrial problems and two, “Health and Work” and “Food and Health” are subjects of general concern.

The inquiries include both factual questions about habits and activities and questions asked to discover public attitudes. In general the plan has been first to determine to what proportion of the group a problem applies, and secondly, to study attitudes towards the problem.

For instance, in “Working Women” an attempt is made first to discover what proportion of wage-earning women have household responsibilities and then to find out whether this section is experiencing difficulties and what the particular difficulties are.

In “Canteens” the proportion of workers in different groups having access to canteens is first investigated and then the extent to which they are used and people’s attitudes towards them.

In each report the dates between which interviewing was carried out are given and later reports sometimes contain references to earlier ones.

The plan used in writing individual reports has been first to give results yielded by the whole sample, and then to break them down into different groups, age, sex, occupation, etc. Breakdowns are given only where statistically significant differences are shown.

The questions asked are given in the text of the reports. As these questions formed a part only of questionnaires containing other questions on different subjects, the whole questionnaire is not reproduced in any of these reports.

In most cases details of the sample are given at the end of the report, but sometimes these have been incorporated in the text at the beginning.

A short summary of results is given at the beginning of the longer reports.