Behavior in laundromats
In a laundry, how do people behave? Scholars mostly avoided the question until the early 1980s, when Regina Kenen became the first sociologist to camp out in a middle-class laundry and take detailed notes.
Kenen, an assistant professor of sociology at Trenton State College in New Jersey, published a study called Soapsuds, Space, and Sociability: A Participant Observation of the Laundromat.
Kenen gathered her data, she tells us, in “the San Francisco Bay area laundromat that I used regularly”….
So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian.