Conrad M. Arensberg

The Community-Study Method

Community study has come to be one of the common methods of social science, deepening older social surveys with descriptive techniques based on field observation and contributing to sociology, anthropology, and social psychology. Critical re-examination of the use of the method shows it to be the study of social science problems and phenomena in vivo. Its success lies in its yielding priorities of relevance among factors, more realistic hypotheses, and better explanatory models. Community studies have proved communities to be structural units of cultural and social organization and transmission. They have revealed unexpected relationships among social, cultural, and psychological phenomena anda better basis for comparative ecology and urban sociology.

The Old World Peoples: The Place of European Cultures in World Ethnography

In the light of increasing numbers of ethnological studies in European cultures, undertaken now in nearly every part of Europe with the methods of modern cultural anthropological community study or ethnographic field study and analysis, it is much to be hoped that some sort of determined effort at comparison, confrontation, and generalization of the results will soon be made. The present special issue may serve as a first move in this direction.

Community Study: Retrospect and Prospect

Community study as a method of social science has undergone extensive transformation since its inception and now exhibits some divergence from the traditional use of such concepts as structure, function, and role. Those who have utilized subtantive findings from community studies to establish the validity of a priori theories have not understood the process through which new insights are won in the use of the community-study method. The new emphasis is upon the search for principles of process and the nature of change in contrast to the original descriptive and taxonomic orientation. The development of methods for system, interaction, and event analysis have proved to be the most important theoretical tools in this advance.