Hornell Hart

What is a Social Problem

An inductive study of the topics covered in leading books and articles discussing social problems suggests their classification under the four heads: economic, health, political, and educational problems. Further analysis leads to a definition covering all the problems listed. None of them can be solved without the aid of highly specialized technique, but none of them, on the other hand, can be satisfactorily isolated from the others and solved by itself. The investigation of any of the problems, moreover, can be greatly facilitate by the use of statistical technique. Out of the need for better informed public sentiment, out of the necessity for correlating the various problems, and out of the use of the common thechnique, arises the necessity of recognizing social problems as a definite subject for teaching and for research, distinct from any of the specialties associated with it. Its general objective is to discover how to minimize undesirable social conditions and how to maximize desirable social conditions. Sociology, as distinguished from the stydy of social problems, is concerned with the investigation of social origins, social structure and social processes. Social case work, as distinguished from social problems, is concerned with the treatment of the individual case rather than the solution of group problmes.

Have Subhuman Animals Culture

Although the continuity of animal life from thelowest up through homo sapiens is almost universally accepted among scientists, there is still a widespread tendency to make a sharp distinction between man and lower animals in capacity for culture. Culture consists in behavior patterns transmitted by imitation or tuition. Domesticated animals acquire culture complexes from human beings. Animals acquire behavior complexes by the limitation of one another. Instances of instruction of the young by animal parents are authoritatively reported. Songs invented by certain birds and then acquired by other birds through association are conclusive evidence of the rudiments of culture, in the strictest sense of the word. In culture, as well as in other respects, there is no sharp break between man and the lower animals.

Science and Sociology

The scientific achievements of sociology have been disappointing. Sociology is properly a utilitarian science. The five methods of sociology.-In it five inductive methods of seeking truth may be considered. The common-sense method, consisting in generalizing from data which chance to come to hand, has been the most prominent. The historical method uses documents as its data. The museum or census method, having classification as its goal, has been used extensively in social surveys and government investigations. The laboratory or experimental method is restricted in sociological research by the length of time required for social experiments, by the number and complexity of the variables involved, and by the difficulty of controlling human variables. Superiority of the statistical method.-The statistical method consists in applying rigidly objective methods, aided by mathematics, to the interpretation of the social phenomena which spontaneously occur. In the form of simple comparisons the method has been widely used, but its value has been limited by the lack of comprehension of the method even in its crude form, and by the failure of crude comparisons to answer adequately the questions involved. Partial correlation and regression meet the needs of social research by furnishing predictions of stated variables in terms of other measured of classified variables, and by indicating the importance of the variables not considered. The development of reliable indices for certain social variables is prerequiste to the solution of fundamental sociological problems by statistical methods.

Depression, War, and Logistic Trends

This study presents twelve different series of statistical data, in which growth previous to 1928 conformed very closely to logistic trends. In seven of these, the great depression brought statistically significant departures from previous trends, with no clearly established postdepression trend; in five series, two or more successive logistic trends are shown. Of the nine series inaugurated before 1915, five maintained their logistic trends during World War I. The hypothesis is suggested that human culture develops through a series of growth surges, which tend to conform to logistic or Gompertz trends and that various sociological phenomena can be understood and dealt with succesfully only if viewed as space-time configurations in which parts are mathematical functions of wholes.

Was There a Prehistoric Trend from Smaller to Larger Political Units

As a step toward more trustworthy social prediction, especially in the field of international relations, this article demonstrates the reliability, validity, and intercorrelation of indices of political and of technological development among forty-six representative modern preliterate peoples. A rating scale for technological development, applicable to either modern or prehistoric peoples, is presented, and its validity is demonstrated. A rating scale indicative of the geographical extent of political development is also presented. These scales are applied in two independent studies, one covering five peoples described by Murdock; the other covering thirty-one other preliterate peoples. Each of these studies shows a high positive correlation between technological and political development among primitive peoples. A regression formula is derived from these studies. When applied to prehistoric epochs, this method shows that the area controlled by any one people has increased at an accelerating rate of speed during prehistoric as well as during historic times.

Trends of Change in Textbooks on the Family

Textbooks on the family, published by American writers since the Word War, have largely abandoned the ethnological and historical treatment of the subject, which predominated in earlier texts, and have turned toward social problems and personality relationships of family life. Similar trends are evident in articles on the family published in social science periodicals. But courses on the family in colleges and universities have lagged in shifting from the old to the new interests. A group of young mothers, when asked what additional training they wished their college courses might have given them, showed overwhelmigly more interest in the social psychology of family relations than in sociological theory. Courses on the family may well be reconsidered, not merely in the light of pure science, but also in view of the needs and interests of the students, and the trends of modern thought.