What are Sociological Problems?

Abstract

S A PARTIAL ANSWER to the question posed by the title, I shall ex,LI amine three projects recently completed or under way. Although 1 . There is also much other excellent work going on, these projects are especially clearcut examples of what some sociologists today consider sociological problems. They are also examples of what seems to me a profitable method of approach to such problems as they are related to the development of sociological theory. The first is a very limited and specific problem; the two others are of increasing broadness of scope pointing toward more comprehensive sociological theory. Stouffer's Theory of Mobility and Intervening Opportunities. The sociological aspects of the distribution and movement of people in geographic space long has attracted the curiosity of students. A vast amount of folklore and commonsense knowledge has accumulated and is in daily use. Every real estate broker and storekeeper knows something about the behavior of people in this regard, nor is it necessary to review the general hypotheses or theories on which ecologists are largely agreed. Rather, I will review a brilliant attempt at verification of one of these theories by rigorous scientific methods-the respect in which sociological theories are at present weakest. I refer to the study presented by S. A. Stouffer before the I939 meeting of the American Sociological Society.2 The specific problem which Stouffer set himself was to discover the way in which operates to determine the distribution of people's movements. Obviously, operates in many ways. The broad generalization that most people go a short distance, few people go a long distance still leaves unanswered the interesting sociological questions as to who does each under stated conditions and why. A mere catalog of all the individual answers that might be made to this question would yield little of general scientific interest unless these various answers can be generalized under some concept or concepts which will serve as an organizing principle. This principle should be of such generally valid character as to apply to such disparate examples as the movement of one man from one place to another to commit crime and the movement of another to marry a particular spouse. Both of these cases and an indefinite number and variety of others thus become merely special cases of an explicit sociological law. Consider, for example, the triumph, from the scientific point of view, of a field of knowl-