Disaster and the Sequence-Pattern Concept of Social Change

Abstract

Social change is much broader than cultural change and includes also populational changes, relational changes, and catastrophic changes. Study of catastrophic changes supports the hypothesis that all social change tends to follow a definite sequence-pattern: (1) a precipitating event or condition; (2) adjustment-dislocation; (3) individual, interactive, and cultural readjustments. As a working hyothesis this means that episodic views of social change must be given up: no single event in the series can be called the change to the exclusion of the rest. Applied to statistics this suggests the value of selective sampling to describe the cycle. Other research problems include the search for possible analogues of cultural lag in relational and population changes and for techniques for identifying the precipitating event to facilitate the study of contemporary social process.