Gottlieb Schnapper-Arndt

Grave of Schnapper-Arndt in Frankfurt am Main

Gottlieb Schnapper-Arndt (born October 2, 1846 in Frankfurt am Main , † March 2, 1904 in Halberstadt ) was a German private scholar and lecturer in statistics .

Life

Gottlieb Schnapper-Arndt was slightly physically disabled and attended non-profit institutions early on during spa stays . He worked scientifically and was socially engaged. He also used reportage elements : a style that can serve to establish himself better alongside nature, medicine and science journalism .

A "like-minded wife" accompanied him while researching , whose maiden name Arndt he had adopted with royal permission.

At the age of 55 he was appointed as a lecturer in statistics by the new Academy for Social and Commercial Sciences in Frankfurt am Main. Many of his handwritten research and completed questionnaires are still stored in the Johann Christian Senckenberg University Library to this day .

Technical and impact history

Gottlieb Schnapper-Arndt is still regarded as application-oriented scientific pioneer methodical direction for on thorough social science research and documentation beruhendem social science journalism . Even if typically without explicit references, references and quotations - all forms of digging into the “social milieu” that place “value on maintaining the plastic character of the material” in their qualitative data surveys and presentations still apply today ( Erwin K. Scheuch ), based on social science methods of empirical field research that were first developed and tested by Schnapper-Arndt .

In contrast to the “social romantic” Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl , the founder of the scientific discipline, which for decades was called “ Folklore ” and is now called “ Empirical Cultural Studies ”, Schnapper-Arndt referred more to the (natural) scientific methods in general that were developing rapidly at the time and (social) statistics in particular. In the German and Austrian sociology of the late 1920s and early 1930s, these social science approaches and their forms of access to social reality are confidently linked to: for example, on a small scale in the lesser-known "village studies" by Leopold von Wiese (1928) and in the one that is still widely received today, Marienthal study by Marie Jahoda and Hans Zeisel (1933) on the effects of long-term unemployment in a Lower Austrian industrial village of uniforms and draperies south of Vienna, inspired and forewarned by Paul F. Lazarsfeld , or, from a medium-transnational perspective, in Adolf Günther's settlement-sociological research on “Alpine society” as a social and political, economic and cultural sphere of life "(1930), or in Theodor Geiger's overall social, at that time trend-setting, study on the social stratification of the German people as a" sociographic attempt on statistical Gr undlage "(1932).

Fonts

• Description of the economy and statistics of the economic accounts of the family of a clock sign painter in the bathroom. Black Forest [1882/83]; Reprint: State Statistical Office Baden-Württemberg, 1990
• Five village communities on the Hohe Taunus. A social statistical study on small-scale farming, domestic industry and folk life , (Political and social science research, vol. 4, no.2), Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot 1883, XIII, 322 pp. (37.2 MbB) ( online version as PDF )
• High Taunus. A social statistical study in five village communities [1883]; edit by Erich Peter Neumann , Allensbach: Verlag für Demoskopie, ³1975, XXXVIII / 249 p. (= Classics of Survey Research Vol. 3) ( ISBN 3-87848-001-6 )

Posthumously

• Lectures and essays , Tübingen 1906 (edited by Leon Zeitlin)
• Social statistics. (Lectures on population theory, economic and moral statistics. A reading book for the educated, especially for students). Edited by Leon Zeitlin. With 10 illustrations in the text u. 22 plate, Leipzig: Klinkhardt 1908, XXII, 642 p. (115.2 MB) ( online version as PDF )
• Studies on the history of the standard of living in Frankfurt a. M. during the 17th and 18th centuries . Based on the estate of Gottlieb Schnapper-Arndt ed. by Karl Bräuer , part 1–2, (publications of the Historical Commission of the City of Frankfurt a. M .. 2,1-2), Frankfurt a. M .: Baer 1915, XXXII, 405; XL, 433 p. (144.2 MB) ( online version as PDF )

literature

• Hendrik Fischer: Measure without measure. Ways and wrong ways of Gottlieb Schnapper-Arndt . In: Christian Kleinschmidt (Hrsg.): Curiosities of economic, corporate and technical history. Miniatures of a "happy science" . Klartext-Verlag, Essen 2008, ISBN 978-3-89861-969-1 , pp. 106–112.

Movie

• Half-hour film about Gottlieb Schnapper-Arndt's study in the Hohe Taunus in the program structures in the science television of the Hessischer Rundfunk on March 9, 1988.

Web links

• Literature by and about Gottlieb Schnapper-Arndt in the catalog of the German National Library
• KF Bohler on the village studies in the Hohe Taunus