Miss Mary E. Richmond in “What is Social Case Work?” (Russell Sage Foundation, N.Y., 1922) breaks up what Mr. Lee calls “preventive work” into three parts (pp. 223, 224). “The other forms of social work all of which interplay with case work, are three—group work, social reform, and social research. Case work seeks to effect better social relations by dealing with individuals one by one or within the intimate group of the family. But social work also achieves the same general ends in these other ways. It includes a wide variety of group activities—settlement work, recreational work, club, neighborhood and local community work—in which the individual, though still met face to face, becomes one of a number. By a method different from that employed in either case or group work, though with the same end in view, social reform seeks to improve conditions in the mass, chiefly through social propaganda and social legislation. Whether the immediate object be better housing, better working conditions, better use of leisure, or a long list of other objectives, the main purpose in these different social reforms still is to advance the development of our human kind by improving social relations. Finally, social research with its precious freight of original discovery in all the fields covered by social work, has also the secondary task of assembling known facts in order to reinterpret them for use in social reform, in group work and in case work.”
A fair amount of searching has failed to reveal many statements which do as much as the above toward defining social work in succinct and specific terms. One finds instead descriptions which, while satisfactory enough for the purposes for which each was intended, ascribe to it no really distinctive character but rather present it in generalizations equally true of other disinterested undertakings, or by making it synonymous with applied sociology or applied religion simply throw the burden of definition onto those other terms leaving the matter as indefinite as before.
APPENDIX II
A
A list of the schools belonging (in 1921) to the “Association of Training Schools for Professional Social Workers,” organized 1919, President. Prof. J. E. Cutler, Western Reserve University.
Boston School of Social Work, Boston.
Carola Woerishoffer Graduate Department of Social Economy and Social Research, Bryn Mawr College.
College of Commerce and Journalism, Ohio State University.
Department of Social Work, Carnegie Institute of Technology.
Department of Social Work, University of Toronto.