CHAPTER VIII
CAN NEIGHBORHOOD WORK HAVE A SCIENTIFIC BASIS?
Neighborhood work at present and as now practiced cannot, for two reasons, be said to be based upon science. First, the social sciences—and I refer to sociology in particular—have at present little to offer as a scientific basis for social work; secondly, what knowledge the social sciences have accumulated has been used little, or not at all, by neighborhood workers.
The trend of neighborhood work to a scientific basis.—But if neighborhood work has not had a scientific basis, it has had, from its inception, as one of its conscious or unconscious motives, the search after knowledge as the basis of human relations. Settlement work, especially, represents not only the most devoted and the most idealistic, but also the most intelligent, phase of social work of the past generation. The settlement in its origin was an extension of the university. It carried over into a new environment the love of truth and, it may be added, the spirit of science. The residents of the settlement were brought at once into touch with social reality; that is, with the concrete facts of human life.
This early venture into intimate contact with social reality may accordingly be called the first stage in the trend of neighborhood work toward a scientific basis. But settlement workers soon found that sympathetic understanding and intimate contacts failed to solve many of the actual problems of neighborhood work. The recalcitrancy of the boys’ gang, the opposition and manipulations of the ward boss, the competition of commercialized recreation, the unsolvable cultural conflict between immigrant parents and Americanized children are only a few of the many perplexing conditions of neighborhood life in immigrant areas which resisted the spirit of good will of settlement workers. They therefore began to study their communities in the attempt to state the factors at work by an analysis of the elements in the situation. Hull House Maps and Papers, The City Wilderness, and Americans in Process are illustrations of the careful study and keen observation of these very early efforts to determine and to take account of the many and different conditions affecting neighborhood work. This interest in the discovery of factors in the social situation may therefore be called the second stage in the trend of neighborhood work toward a scientific basis.
Science, however, is concerned not with factors, but with forces. The distinction is not always clearly drawn between a factor and a force. “Factors are the elements that co-operate to make a given situation. Forces are type-factors operative in typical situations.”[[69]] A factor is thought of as a concrete cause for an individual event; a force is conceived to be an abstract cause for events in general so far as they are similar. A particular gang of boys, the Torpedo gang, of which Tony is the leader—and which is made up of eight street Arabs—is a factor in the situation which a certain settlement in an Italian colony in Chicago faces. But as soon as the attention shifts from this one gang and this particular settlement to settlements in general and to gangs in general the transition is made from a factor to a force. A gang is a factor to a given settlement; the gang is a force from the standpoint of all settlements.
The study of social forces in the community.—If neighborhood work can have a scientific basis, it is because there are social forces in community life—forces like geographical conditions, human wishes, community consciousness—that can be studied, described, analyzed, and ultimately measured. In a series of research projects now in progress in the Department of Sociology in the University of Chicago, studies are being made of the social forces of community life. While the city of Chicago is used as the laboratory for this investigation, it is assumed that the processes of urban life in one community are in certain ways typical of city life throughout the United States.
The term “community” is widely used by sociologists, neighborhood workers, and others, but often with widely divergent meanings. In research in any field it is necessary to define our concepts and to make relevant distinctions. In the literature of the subject there is a growing disposition to emphasize as one of the fundamental aspects of the community its geographical setting. Whatever else the community may be, it signifies individuals, families, groups, or institutions located upon an area and some or all of the relationships which grow out of this common location. “‘Community’ is the term which is applied to societies and social groups where they are considered from the point of view of the geographical distribution of the individuals and institutions of which they are composed.”[[70]]
Upon reflection it is evident that markedly different social relationships may have their roots in the conditions of a common territorial location. Indeed, it is just these outstanding differences in communal activities, viewed in relation to their geographic background, which have caused much of the confusion in the use of the term “community.” For community life, as conditioned by the distribution of individuals and institutions over an area, has at least three quite different aspects.
First of all, there is the community viewed almost exclusively in terms of location and movement. How far has the area itself, by its very topography and by all its other external and physical characteristics, as railroads, parks, types of housing, conditioned community formation and exerted a determining influence upon the distribution of its inhabitants and upon their movements and life? To what extent has it had a selective effect in sifting and sorting families over the area by occupation, nationality, and economic or social class? To what extent is the work of neighborhood or community institutions promoted or impeded by favorable or unfavorable location? How far do geographical distances within or without the community symbolize social distances? This apparently “natural” organization of the human community, so similar in the formation of plant and animal communities, may be called the “ecological community.”
No comprehensive study of the human community from this standpoint has yet been made. A prospectus for such a study is outlined in an earlier chapter by Professor R. D. McKenzie, in this volume, under the title, “The Ecological Approach to the Study of the Human Community.”[[71]] Yet there are several systematic treatises and a rapidly growing literature of scientific research in the two analogous fields of plant ecology and animal ecology. The processes of competition, invasion, succession, and segregation described in elaborate detail for plant and animal communities seem to be strikingly similar to the operation of these same processes in the human community. The assertion might even be defended that the student of community life or the community organization worker might secure at present a more adequate understanding of the basic factors in the natural organization of the community from Warming’s Oecology of Plants or from Adams’s Guide to the Study of Animal Ecology than from any other source.