The survey has been negatively criticized for its methodology. Booth used school board visitors — those who undertook to ensure the attendance of children at school - to collect information on the circumstances of families. However, his extrapolation from these findings to families without school-age children was speculative. Moreover, his ‘definitions’ of the poverty levels of household ‘classes’ were general descriptive categories that did not equate to specific criteria. Although the seventeen volumes were dense with often fascinating detail, it was primarily descriptive rather than analytical.