Following conferences for Superintendents and Supervisors of Civil
Service typists convened by the Department of the Public Service, the
authors of this report were asked to carry out a survey of facts and attitudes
relating to all typists employed in government offices in Dublin. This necessarily
involved an acquaintance with their work and working conditions. One
of the authors therefore made use of previous experience in industry to work
as a typist in a Departmental typing section, while the other visited typing
sections in other Departments. The information gained from this participative
observation and from interviews was then used to construct two questionnaires.
The first of these was specifically about the work the typists did,
the size and type of work groups to which they belonged, the officials they
typed for, their Supervisors, and their pre-employment training. The same
questionnaire contained a number of general questions of the kind usually
incorporated in questionnaires addressed to office and industrial workers;
these were taken from job satisfaction studies carried out in Ireland and elsewhere
and, where necessary, modified. The second questionnaire sought to
establish the effect of the location of the typists’ work on their lives outside
work. Unlike most social surveys which are based on samples, the present
study encompassed practically every Civil Service typist working in Dublin
in 1972
