Abstract
Adopting the social survey as an analytical tool, this paper explores the origins of a sociology of leisure. Modern social understandings of leisure were formed in the expansion of the social sciences in the late nineteenth century in parallel with the growth of systematic and scientifically informed social work. In both Great Britain and the United States of America the survey became a widely adopted method of gathering data to inform social work. Through advances in social work and the settlement movement’s association with universities an embryonic sociology of leisure had emerged by 1914. After the First World War leisure became a field of policy discourse in post-war reconstruction and the subject of large scale surveys in both countries. These surveys give insight to new and changing sociological understandings of leisure which provided the foundations for the formal recognition of leisure as a sociological field in the late twentieth century.