The Application of the Social Survey to Small Communities

Abstract

The social survey is one of the best answers to the assertion sometimes made by ignorant or prejudiced people that sociology is not and cannot be scientific. Here is a beginning at least of the measurement according to objective standards of social phenomena. True it is a movement which has concerned itself chiefly with the measurement of the phenomena of social disorder, rather than with the phenomena of normal social life. It is quite possible also that the ultimate solution of many of the problems which the social survey studies will have to wait until sociology shall have collected certain data in regard to normal social life. Nevertheless, the movement is one which deals with objective phenomena. These can be counted and compared, which is the first requisite of scientific method. While, therefore, in the social survey methods are being devised especially to handle in a scientific manner social phenomena of a so-called practical nature, these methods are being adapted to the treatment of other classes of social phenomena for example, that most difficult field of sociology, the social mind. Just as the aspersion that psychology was not a science has been answered by devices which enable men to measure objectively the facts of mentality, so the methods of the sociologist in the social survey applied to the investigation of social evils, and adapted to use in the field of the social mind are refuting the charge that sociology is unscientific. However, although this is true there yet remains much to be done in the development of the exact measurement of social facts. Thus far the social survey has suffered from some glaring defects, some of them inhereht in the difficulties of the subject-matter, others due to the crudity of the methods thus far devised. Furthermore, it has failed to take account of those elusive, spiritual facts