The Frankfurt group’s wartime interview material covered topics other social scientists avoided.

Evidence

Despite scepticism among the assistants themselves, one thing was clear from the very beginning: the material they had acquired was of the greatest interest. It was concerned with matters which other social scientists preferred not to touch. The transcripts were processed using descriptive and interpretative categoriesjust like the material that had been gathered in the inquiry on the working class in the second half of the 1930s, although no explicit connection was made between the two projects. In ten weeks of intense collective work, a `scoring manual’ to code the transcripts of the discussions was produced. In the quantitative analysis, the individuals, not the discussion groups, were treated as statistical units and collated under statistical groups independent of the discussion groups, such as twentyto thirty-year-olds, primary school children, farmers, and so on. The results were depressing. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1885

Categorization

• XREF: Matches the earlier working-class inquiry of the late 1930s already documented in this book; the unacknowledged methodological continuity is striking.