Abstract
Four hundred farm families were studied in 1927 by the Social Survey Department of the Chinese National Association of the Mass Education Movement in an effort to secure figures that would give a picture of the economic life and activities of the farm families of Tinghsien, Hopei Province. The families all lived in the eastern part of the hsien in the 62 villages included in the Movement's First Experimental District. Preliminary and experimental work was carried on in this limited area before the hsien-wide program of the Movement was inaugurated. Contact was made with the families studied, generally through the teachers of the Mass Education schools. Being a project of an educational group, the study was able to enlist the cooperation of nearly all of the families approached. Although we attempted by chance selection to make our group of families as nearly typical as possible, we recognize that our choice was necessarily affected by such factors as the families' willingness to cooperate in an unusual study, readiness to answer many intimate questions and that our group, therefore, probably had a higher than average intellectual and economic level and a more than average number of the larger and wealthier farms. We have attempted to overcome this difference by dividing the 400 families into several groups according to the size of their farms, thus giving several pictures of farm activity on different economic levels rather than just the averages for our particular group.
