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This paper looks at the vitality of Polish social surveys conducted during the interwar period. These surveys were subsequently erased from the history of the social sciences as a result of political, national and demographic upheavals. Four successive surveys are presented and described within their political, institutional and academic contexts. What links these surveys is not a single methodology or topic, but rather the social activism of their designers, who transformed the ways in which working-class experiences were collected in order to adapt these methods to changing political and social circumstances. The paper develops this argument in two directions: firstly, by emphasising the role of private institutes in conducting surveys, and their competing and complementary relationships with public institutes; secondly, by highlighting a transnational and Central European space for the circulation of knowledge that provided the references and recognition needed to bolster the institutes’ autonomy.