SUBURBIA? The word alone is enough to unleash myths: a place afloat in behind-the-fridge gin, high on pot concealed in oregano jars, giddy with spouse swapping--and bored nonetheless. Perhaps an even greater fiction is that the terrain between city lines and countryside is uniform down to the last resident's outlook and lawn. In planning this week's cover story on the suburbs, TIME'S editors decided to challenge the myths head-on to discover how much diversity there really is among the nation's suburbs and suburbanites.

To make that challenge effective, TIME decided on a dual approach: polling by Louis Harris Associates in 100 towns and intensive reporting by staff correspondents in four representative communities. The editors and the Harris organization collaborated on preparing a nine-page questionnaire. Harris' interviewers spent some 1,600 hours conducting in-depth interviews with 1,614 people. Back in New York, the replies were numerically-coded, keypunched, and fed into an IBM 360 computer. From this process emerged not only statistical findings, such as income levels and the growth rate of communities, but some surprising attitudes on child rearing, sex, politics, drugs, crime, and the virtues and problems of suburban life.

After such factors as the size of suburb, nearness to a central city, rate of growth and educational level were examined, four basic community types came into focus. A correspondent was then assigned to explore one example of each. "Our purpose was to map the suburbs as they exist today in three dimensions," said Senior Editor Jason McManus. Keith Johnson, who wrote the story from the material supplied by Harris, the correspondents and Reporter-Researcher Marguerite Michaels, found as he studied the returns that he too had "enjoyed the mythology, but I always wondered how accurate it really was. Not very accurate at all, as it turned out."

Exchanging one's personal notions for the facts is, of course, the business of journalists--and of polltakers. So is translating facts into understanding. Michael Edison, a Harris staffer who helped devise the poll, says that "the masses of numbers seem dry, but you realize that it's really thousands of people talking, and you try to save the echoes of what they are saying." In this week's cover story, the editors of TIME have attempted to do just that.

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