Abstract

Three fertility surveys were carried out in Korea in the 1960s through funding provided by the Population Council. In this study, I reveal the sociological turn in population studies in Korea that occurred over the 1960s and 1970s by focusing on sociologist Yi Hae-yeong’s 1965 fertility survey and a 1972 scholarly conference hosted by the Korean Sociological Association under the title “Sociological Evaluation of Korean Family Planning Research Activities.” I analyze the academic foundations of fertility surveys in the 1960s (i.e., ‘coupling to American academia’), internal changes of the actors implementing the surveys in the field (i.e., ‘feedback from the field’), and the discursive challenge to medical doctor-led implementation of fertility surveys initiated by tacit knowledge of survey (i.e., ‘competition for institutional resources’). Thus, I review the attempt at the Koreanization of social surveys in the field of sociology and the sociological turn in population studies, and explore the reason this legacy has been forgotten.