Behavioral and Social Science 50 Years of Discovery (1986) / Chapter Skim
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The Ogburn Vision Fifty Years Later
The Ogburn Vision Fifty Years Later
Pages 19-35
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Understanding Social Change
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That massive book was the report of a special committee of social scientists commissioned in 1929 by President Herbert Hoover to conduct a survey on the subject. It was a monumental undertaking, the last in a series of efforts of the Hoover administration to augment the knowledge base for social policy.
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7091. She mentioned industrial advances, the rise of specialized services, and the decreased size of the family as having eliminated many of women's household activities.
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In addition to the possibility that race and other controversial areas were soft-pedaled, it should be remembered that race relations were then still largely regional rather than national, that the political mobilization of blacks was in its infancy, and that neither politicians nor social scientists had begun seriously to challenge the racist foundations of American social life all of which would contribute to the low visibility of racial problems. THE OGBURN VISION OF SOCIAL PROCESS One reviewer of Recent Social Trends remarked that "the Committee findings are so unified and eloquent as to give the impression of single authorship" (Mallery, 1933:2111.
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More particularly, Ogburn saw changes in technology as well as economic and governmental organization leading the way of change in modern times, with the family and church having declined in social significance. The image of society evoked by this notion is what sociologists call "the functionalist view," namely, that the different parts of social organization stand in systematic whether harmonious or disharmonious relationship to one another, and that changes in one call for changes in another.
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In the ensuing decades social scientists have become more sophisticated in their understanding of what constitutes a social problem. We now see that social problems emerge as a complex process of interaction between "objective" social conditions, the criteria people bring to bear in evaluating those conditions, and the success or failure of efforts of interest groups to push their particular criteria forward.
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DOCUMENTATION BY OBJECTIVE FACTS In his introduction to Recent Social Trends, Herbert Hoover spoke of his desire "to have a complete, impartial examination of the facts" in the report. In a way this phrase encapsulates the mentality of the social sciences in the early twentieth century the acme of positive science, which regarded empirical facts as objective things, waiting to be observed, recorded, and quantified.
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Pitirim Sorokin, sociologist at Harvard, in a savage review of Recent Social Trends in 1933, bemoaned what he called "holy and immaculate quantification": In the future some thoughtful investigator will probably write a very illuminating study about these "quantitative obsessions" of a great many social scientists, psychologists, and educators of the first third of the twentieth century, tell how such a belief became a vogue, how social investigators tried to "measure" everything; how thousands of papers and research bulletins were filled with tables, figures and coefficients; and how thousands of persons never intended for scientific investigation found in measurement and computation a substitute for real thought....4 Be that as it may, Ogburn's preference for stressing objective facts, apart from opinions and value judgments, held sway in the report itself. The chapters and monographs, the committee said, "present records, not opinions; such substantial stuff as may serve as a basis for social action, rather than recommendations as to the form which action should take" (President's Research Committee on Social Trends, 1933:xciv)
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But social scientists no longer conceive, as a Durkheim or an Ogburn might have done, of the crime rate as a "social fact" to be observed. We know, on the basis of empirical research, that a "crime rate" is a vastly different phenomenon, depending on whether the investigator consults police records, observes police in action, asks people whether they have ever been victims of crimes, or whether they have ever committed crimes.
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By the same token, however, investigators are now equipped systematically to take measurement errors into account when representing and statistically manipulating data, by using techniques that would not come to mind within a simple positivistic perspective. SOCIAL INVENTION According to the Ogburn vision (President's Research Committee on Social Trends, 1933:1xxi)
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Or, alternatively, a "discovery" involves a reformulation at a theoretical level, such that heretofore unrelated empirical findings can be related to one another and explained within a new framework or by a new principle. Put another way, scientific discovery always involves a relation between empirical findings and theoretical formulation, not an accumulation of empirical findings (Kuhn, 19701.6 Furthermore, with respect to "social inventions" a different set of processes needs to be invoked.
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Ferguson was discarded not because social scientists told us that segregation contributed to feelings of inferiority, but because by 1954 enough people in this country believed what they did not in 1896 that to thus insult and emasculate black people was wrong, and intolerable, and therefore, a denial of the equal protection of the law to blacks. In the area of social inventions, as in other areas, the committee's insistence on the neutrality of scientific knowledge and on its separation from matters of opinion involved a cost.
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One feasible policy would be to attack intensively the social conditions of certain high-risk groups, such as the elderly, with the aim of reducing feelings of isolation, desertion, and despair. In implementing this kind of policy, a community might embark on a program of establishing senior citizen clubs as social centers, and making individual agencies, such as suicide prevention centers, more available to them.
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Even though the Ogburn report seeks legitimacy mainly from the framework of positive science, its vision of the social process is characterized by a number of items of faith: faith in the capacity of objective knowledge to identify social problems, faith in the capacity of cumulative knowledge to result in social inventions, and faith in the capacity of those inventions to solve the social problems. That particular set of faiths permitted the committee to be simultaneously naive and pretentious at least as judged by our contemporary understanding about We role of the behavioral and social sciences in social policy.
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In its first report (Adams et al., 1982) , the Committee on Basic Research in the Behavioral and Social Sciences acknowledged this and pointed to three areas in particular: technical contributions in the information-generating process, such as sample surveys and standardized testing; changes in the way we do things, such as administer therapy, predict economic trends, and run organizations; and changes in the way we think about things such as poverty, race, social justice, and equity in society.
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Myers, William Starr, ed. 1934 The State Papers and Other Public Writings of Herbert Hoover.
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