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Social services emerged during the interwar period, presenting themselves as a new means of resolving the social problems of the era. This paper asks how social services understood the economic instability that characterized the working-class families under their supervision? To answer this question, this article looks at the preferred method used by social services: surveys, conducted among all families eligible for social care. I argue that such surveys are constructed and used by social workers with a moralistic perspective, at every step of the way, from family and neighborhood visits, to written documentation, such as the reconstitution of working-class budgets. Although the surveys reveal structural economic instability among many families, there is a tendency among social workers to portray their beneficiaries as responsible for their poverty, blaming their poor budget management and their reprehensible consumption. Social services during the interwar period thus used their surveys not to improve social security, but with the aim of moralizing working-class habits.