The Community-Study Method

Abstract

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.