Robert Staughton Lynd

Robert Staughton Lynd (1892 to 1970) was an American sociologist and professor at Columbia University, best known for conducting the first Middletown studies of Muncie, Indiana, with his wife, Helen Lynd, and for co-authoring Middletown: A Study in Contemporary American Culture (1929) and Middletown in Transition (1937). Born in New Albany, Indiana, he took a bachelor's degree at Princeton in 1914, worked as a publisher's editor, trained at Union Theological Seminary and received a doctorate in sociology from Columbia in 1931, using an abridged version of Middletown as his dissertation. Funded by the Rockefeller family through the Institute of Social and Religious Research, he directed a small city study from 1923 to 1926 and, with Helen, lived in Muncie for eighteen months from 1924, comparing daily life there in 1890 and 1924 to measure the effects of the Industrial Revolution. He taught at Columbia from 1931 to 1960, was a pioneer in the use of social surveys, served on committees under Presidents Hoover and Roosevelt and wrote a 1939 book on the place of the social sciences in American culture.