moral statistics

social data collected, e.g. in France in the 19th-century (preceding the development of sociology as a discipline), and seen to be indicative of social pathology, such as suicide, crime, illegitimacy and divorce. The concern for the collection of social data influenced social reformers in Britain, notably Edwin Chadwick (1800-90). See also SOCIAL ADMINISTRATION, SOCIAL REFORM, OFFICIAL STATISTICS.

Collins Dictionary of Sociology, 3rd ed. © HarperCollins Publishers 2000

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References in periodicals archive

The lecturer was the eminent Wesleyan minister and former missionary the Reverend William Arthur, who took as his theme "The Extent and Moral Statistics of the British Empire." The lecture argues that the moral direction of the British Empire was not yet clear.

(8.) William Arthur, "The Extent and Moral Statistics of the British Empire," in Twelve Lectures, 75-76.

An anthropology of hope: Africa, slavery, and civilization in nineteenth-century mission thinking

In the final decades of the nineteenth century, two influential and methodologically sophisticated statistical studies of suicide appeared, which confirmed the link between modernity and the alleged increasing incidence of suicide: Henry Morselli's Suicide: An Essay on Comparative Moral Statistics (1879) and Thomas G.

See Henry Morselli, Suicide: An Essay on Comparative Moral Statistics (New York, 1882), 174.

Suicide, gender, and the fear of modernity in nineteenth-century medical and social thought

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