An Experiment in the Defining and Measuring of Group Adjustment

Abstract

S OCIAL behavior is a common, every-day phenomenon. It is about as easy for the social investigator to locate as is the common cold for the medical investigator. And yet how little is really known about it. One theory about the common cold is that it is caused by some filterable virus. The implication here is that laboratory tools are deficient. Medical investigators have a scheme of interpretation for this phenomenon which is based on the theoretical analysis of the subject matter. Their experimental data have significance to the extent that they fit into a comprehensive scheme of interpretation of disease. There are many laboratories for the experimental study of the common cold; there are few laboratories for the experimental study of social behavior set up and directed from the point of view of sociology. Experimental approach in sociology is a recent arrival in the family of sociological methods. It is not yet a well recognized procedure. It is probably fair to say that this new method is only beginning to develop a discipline founded on the experimental study of social behavior of the individual in the group. The ultimate purpose of such study is presumably to establish an objective basis for the prediction and control of social behavior. Since group work deals with the adjustment of individuals through group association, it is obvious that it must look to this new discipline as a theoretical basis for practice. This paper is written from the point of view of a group worker who has been unable to find an adequate theoretical basis for practice in past sociological studies and who for some ten years has been in the role of a pseudo-experimental sociologist trying to evolve a satisfactory concept of group adjustment and the means for its measurement. The laboratory has been a summer camp. The area of investigation has been limited to primary groups. The study began in I924 and the field investigation ended in I933. The first problem to be met was the formulation of some scheme of interpretation of social behavior based on the theoretical analysis of the subject matter, namely, group life. Such an analysis must properly precede the development of techniques for gathering data, if the data are to have any scientific significance. One scheme of interpretation of social behavior employed for purposes of sociological investigation has been that social behavior is primarily the resultant of what is termed the psychological adjustment of the individual.