THE SCIENTIFIC ELEMENT IN SOCIAL WORK
The historical perspective which shows social work to have developed
out of charity shows also that there is a close relation between that
development and contemporaneous developments in other lines. We know
that in every field of production, trade and business, enterprising
men have lately developed practical sciences to replace the old rules
of thumb, and that even in such a field as teaching there has lately
appeared a derived science of pedagogy which levies on psychology and
other direct sciences for its material. The stewards of charity, like
other people, saw the light of science full on their path. The result
was a new hope. Again and again in statements like the following we
have been told that the grosser disabilities which charity relieved
could be done away with for good if we would systematically search
out and treat their causes. “Poverty, vice and crime are no more
impossible to stamp out from human society than small-pox and measles.
To do the one requires the same intelligence on the part of man,
though perhaps in a higher degree, that the other does. The social
sciences and arts should have the same expansion as all the other
sciences and arts combined in that the relations of men to each other
are equally important if not more important than the relations of
man to nature.”[18] Or again, “The most formidable obstacle to the
adoption of the policy of prevention and treatment is not resistance
to the necessary public expenditure, still less inability to raise the
money, but the lack of administrative science and the shortcomings of
our administrative machinery. Merely to relieve destitution has been
nearly as easy as to do nothing. But successfully to intervene in order
to prevent--whether to prevent sickness, to prevent the neglect of
children, to prevent the multiplication of the mentally unfit, or to
prevent unemployment--involves the discovery of causes, the formation
of large schemes of policy, the purposeful planning of collective
action in modifying the environment of the poorer classes, together
with scientifically diversified treatment of those individuals who fall
below the recognized standards of civilized life.”[19]
When charity had thus accepted the necessity of using scientific
methods there ensued immediate and far-reaching results. Chief of
these have been the three developments which transformed charity into
social work. It is possible to trace them in performance and to trace
a parallel development of philosophy in the literature of the subject.
These developments can be simply indicated as (1) a systematization of
service; (2) an interest in causes of disaster, and (3) an extension of
charitable interest into new fields.[20]
THE SYSTEMATIZATION OF SERVICE
The converts to a scientific method undertook to work within the
traditional field of charity with a new thoroughness and system.[21]
Fired with the belief of their times in a tenable norm of prosperity
and a continuous progress dependent only on scientific control of our
environment they naturally hoped that the most stubborn situation could
be harmonized with the general melioration by the use of appropriate
methods and they were no longer content to offer only relief, work,
care for the helpless and such simple services as were once all that
was thought of. They constantly challenged the applicability of old
palliative expedients and looked for reconstructive measures. “For
every one thing,” writes Miss Richmond, “that could then (1832) be
done about a man’s attitude toward his life and his social relations,
about his health, housing, work and recreation, there are now (1917)
a dozen things to do. The power to analyze a human situation closely
as distinguished from the old method of falling back upon a few
general classifications, grows with the consciousness of the power to
get things done.”[22] This change in expectation may be seen in the
nomenclature of the tasks which social work has set itself. At first
“relief” was the objective, then “_adequate_ relief” and now it is
“rehabilitation.” The methods were, first the alternatives “relief” or
“corrective treatment,” for there were sheep and goats in those days,
then “preventive treatment” and now “adjustment.”
Rehabilitation and adjustment are far more delicate and responsible
matters than mere relief or even “preventive treatment” and we find
social workers warning each other that “life cannot be administered by
definite rules and regulations and that wisdom to deal with a man’s
difficulties comes only through some knowledge of his life and habits
as a whole and that to treat a separate episode is almost sure to
invite blundering.”[23] The excuse for quoting so obvious a statement
is that former practice actually required it to be made. Philanthropy
took little cognizance of its supposed beneficiaries’ “life and habits
as a whole.” Such a feat of synthetic judgment cannot of course be
more than roughly approximated. It has, however, proved possible to
develop a technique of inquiry, analysis, interpretation and direct
or indirect remedial action which is known as social case work and
can be made the subject of systematic instruction in the schools for
training social workers. And within the last six years has come Miss
Richmond’s book with the suggestive title, “Social Diagnosis,” to give
a description of simple charity availing itself of the means suggested
by an age of scientific experiment and so justifying the expression,
“scientific charity,” which, unexplained, sounds so incongruous. The
method of social case work is sometimes claimed to be the essential
and distinguishing feature of social work but if we study the classic
expositions of case work we find that they are describing on their own
showing a _method_[24] and a method which though applicable to many
types of social work is not applicable to all and which is, moreover,
by no means confined to social work. Case work, in any connection,
is the systematic study of all considerable effects and causes in a
particular situation and the development and application of special
means to alter that situation in some preferred direction. Social case
work is simply case work in the form it takes when applied in social
work. There are some fully accepted forms of social work which have
no occasion to use it. Important as it is we must recognize it as an
expedient and not social work per se.
THE INTEREST IN CAUSES
An interest in the causes of disaster is responsible for the
development of those forms of social work which do not retain the
immediate serviceableness of charity proper. It has developed as
part of the already described attempt to systematize philanthropic
service and also on an independent line of its own. “In practically
all departments of the work of prevention” write the Webbs, “in the
campaign against degeneration and in favor of promotion of better
breeding; in the campaign against the ruin of adolescence, the creation
of unemployment and the demoralization of the unemployed--we are
always being stopped by the need for further experience and additional
research. We know enough now to know how extremely important it is to
increase our knowledge.”[25]
This need of more knowledge after every step before the next can
be taken, this constant challenge offered by our uncharted social
life has caused the development of an interest in observation and
investigation independent of any direct errands of mercy. Many
known abuses exist which are sure to claim their victims from time
to time and a certain amount of social work takes the form of an
independent crusade against such abuses. This type of social work often
embarks on a search for causes of trouble which proves endless and
indistinguishable from the search for knowledge. A great deal of social
work is now of this sort--the studies of the Russell Sage Foundation
and the lesser local foundations for research and prevention, the
original “Pittsburgh Survey” and all those that have followed it,
the careful neighborhood studies of the settlements from the “Hull
House Maps and Papers” on and the intensive group studies, studies,
comparative statistics and stock takings of uncounted miscellaneous
agencies. Inquiry bids fair to be as common in social work as ever alms
was in charity.[26]
THE EXTENSION OF THE PHILANTHROPIC INTEREST
The extension of a philanthropic interest into new fields, the third
result of scientific thoroughness and system has, bewildered us and
occasioned most of the inquiry as to what social work may be. Today in
the administrative departments of Federal and State governments, in the
churches, the courts, the schools, the hospitals there is work being
done which has a double allegiance. On the one hand it is responsible
to government, religion, law, education or public health, as the case
may be, and on the other it is all alike responsible to social work.
The persons who engage in this work are as much social workers as those
in any traditionally philanthropic field and have simply followed
persons whom they are trying to help into situations which philanthropy
did not formerly consider to be its business. Philanthropy has long
taken an interest in jails and reform schools, it has only quite
recently followed into court anyone still unconvicted. This it does
in the case of children and is beginning to do for some classes of
adults. The social worker of the adult court is the probation officer,
a representative of voluntary chivalry toward the defendant, standing
in the very stronghold of implacable justice. The contrast between the
points of view of criminal law and social work is clearly put by a
judge in describing the function of the juvenile court. “The inquiry
(in the juvenile court) is not to determine whether the child is a
criminal or not, but to determine its status in relationship to its
need of the care and protection of the state. Being adjudged in need
of such special care the state assumes its guardianship and oversight,
always for the welfare of the child. The aims and methods of the courts
which administer our criminal laws proceed upon an entirely different
theory. Our penal laws are enacted for the purpose of promoting the
happiness and well-being of society at large, and any who violate
them are termed criminals and outlawed as unfit units of society. The
penalty provided for under these laws is imposed with the end in view
of deterring the offender from again violating his obligation to the
body politic and also of deterring others who might be like-minded.”[27]
In some other fields the introduction of the social worker simply adds
a new sort of service to what is already given. The obligations of both
the doctor and the medical social worker are to the welfare of the
patient, but their work is complementary. Often the social worker has
responsibilities no less than the doctor’s but her diagnosis is of a
situation and its possible interference with the curative process the
doctor prescribes. She must discover and change working conditions or
personal habits that tend to defeat the doctor’s efforts. It is not
a mere accident that this became the task of a social worker. It is
not because it was no medical job and the charitably inclined were
available for it. It is because of a certain characteristic of social
work which is a direct result of the single minded address to the
service of need--namely, a tendency to look upon people from no point
of view but that of interest in their needs, of whatever sort those
needs may be. This habit of taking a _synthetic_ view of their lives,
if such an expression is permissible, gives exactly what was needed to
complement the special and limited services of the doctor.
The same is true in the case of the social worker in the schools.[28]
It is not because there is no other obvious title to give her that the
school visitor is called a social worker but because her responsibility
is not to the standards demanded by the school system nor to any
subject of instruction but to the child himself and the need of the
child in any capacity in which that need may occur. She must satisfy
the need or put him in contact with others who will. The same is
true of social workers employed to give suitable distribution to the
benevolence of churches or who investigate for government departments
or administer government services. There is abundant evidence that
this concern for the individual as such is what is everywhere expected
of the social worker. It is a paradox of this modern development
of philanthropy that scientific method should have led away from
generalization and formula and to a separation of the individual from
the category and the predicament. One can pick up a “Survey” of any
date and read of the social workers reviewing all sorts of data for
light on the nature of individual lives. They study official records
of vagrancy and extract from them information about vagrants.[29] They
attempt to give relevance to Americanization work by studying the
specific backgrounds of diverse foreign groups.[30]
Miss Addams writes of the settlement that “the social injury of the
meanest man not only becomes its concern, but by virtue of its very
locality, it has put itself into a position to see, as no one but a
neighbor can see, the stress and need of those who bear the brunt of
the social injury.” This is in a certain sense true of other forms of
social work as well. Because of their interest in individual lives, and
their constant response to the challenge in every sort of insufficiency
and adversity they transcend the ordinary barriers of social
provincialism and come to know everywhere those who bear the brunt of
the social injury. The social worker seems always to be speaking for
someone who has not managed as well as possible for himself, or for
whom life has arranged badly, or who is not old enough or strong enough
to be his own guardian. He often looks like a fool rushing in where
angels might well fear to tread, but we must concede that he is doing
for someone in an apparently untenable position things that only the
self-sufficing can do for themselves. This synthesis of the interest
of all social work in “personal” predicaments is indicated in the word
“social,” for our social relations are simply our relations as persons.
But it seems to need further exposition because the word social has
been used loosely and no longer carries clear-cut implications. A
lawyer speaking to the 1919 convention defines “individual” interests
as “the claims which the human being makes simply because he is a human
being. For example, the claims to be secure in his reputation and
honor, in his social existence, to be secure in his belief and opinion,
his spiritual existence, to be secure in his domestic relations, in
his expanded individual existence and to be secure in his substance,
his economic existence.”[31] It will be noted that, in the attempt to
define these individual interests even a superlatively able lawyer
could come no nearer to legal precision than to say “for example.” The
concept is one which social work itself continues to alter, fill out
and expand with every breath it draws and is not the less significant
because it is elusive. As social work becomes more systematic with an
almost technical practice, more dissociated from the specific act of
relief and more widely and variously allied with the practices of other
callings this personal, this “social” interest, becomes increasingly
important as one of its distinguishing features.
We may recapitulate the effects of the extension of a charitable
interest into new fields. The charitable interest working along
scientific lines has produced what we know as social work and social
work continues to manifest that interest as its characteristic feature
in all the widely scattered fields to which human needs have called
it. It is, first, everywhere engaged in the gratuitous extension of
benefits. That is to say, it performs services which, while they may be
officially sanctioned, are discretionary and adjustable, and are not
considered established rights in any but the most broadly construed
humanitarian sense. Secondly, it is concerned with negative conditions;
not the successes but the failures interest it, not the promising
people but the difficult people, not the leaders but the under-dogs.
And thirdly, as social work begins to operate in close association
with many other services, we see, what was always implicit in charity
but now first stands out in sharp relief, a prime interest in the
personal needs of individual beneficiaries. This puts social work in
a new relation to public affairs for it not only stands by to gather
up the human wreckage of bad management but it brings to formalized
administration a constant and well-posted challenge to meet individual
requirements.
THE PROPOSED DEFINITION
Diversity in social work may today be more conspicuous than likeness
but under the diversity essential likeness can still be traced. Despite
all appearances to the contrary it has its own department of human
affairs and its universal common interest inherited from charity and
to this department of human affairs, to the service of this interest,
it brings a method adopted from science.
The _department of human affairs_ in which social work operates is
that indicated by the word “social”; men’s relations to each other
rather than their relations to nature. The _interest_ inherited from
charity is an interest in untoward situations; social work, like
charity turns like a compass to the magnet of need; opportunity,
success, superiority do not attract it unless they are beset with some
difficulty which it can remove; handicap, deprivation, insufficiency
offer the challenge to which it responds. The _method_ adopted from
science is that of observation and generalization; social work has
established the fact that just as man cannot live without a certain
food supply, so he cannot thrive as a conscious being without a modicum
of interest, incentive, and leeway of freedom, so that matters long
considered intimate and implicit have now become the objects of close
and deliberate observation. And just as men, endlessly varied in
physical appearance are to the physiologist of one general pattern and
as, far more strangely, the infinite variety of mind is known by the
psychologist to have its common laws of operation, so, strangest and
most illusive of all, men individually unpredictable, do yet, in the
main, follow laws of social behaviour which it is in the power of an
observer to detect. We can say that the main act and final object of
social work are those of charity. The means and methods are those of
science moving in the fields of charitable concern. Social work seems
to comprise a group of allied activities called by a common name and
considered to be but various phases of a single undertaking because
they are all engaged in spontaneous efforts to extend benefits in
response to the evidence of need; they all show a major interest in
improving the social relationship of their beneficiaries and all avail
themselves of scientific knowledge and employ scientific methods.
We may propose as a tentative definition, to be tested and carried
further in the chapters which follow, that social work includes all
voluntary attempts to extend benefits in response to need which are
concerned with social relationships and which avail themselves of
scientific knowledge and employ scientific methods.
FOOTNOTES:
[18] Professor C. A. Ellwell, in Charities and the Commons for 1907, p.
187.
[19] Beatrice and Sidney Webb, The Prevention of Destitution, p. 330.
[20] Owen R. Lovejoy, Proceedings of National Conference of Social
Work, 1919, pp. 666-7.
[21] Mary E. Richmond, Ibid. 1920, p. 254.
[22] Mary E. Richmond, Social Diagnosis, p. 29.
[23] Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House, p. 162.
[24] See especially Mary E. Richmond, What Is Social Case Work?
[25] Beatrice and Sidney Webb, The Prevention of Destitution, p. 333.
[26] When such inquiries have been undertaken by the government they
have often been proposed and prepared for by social work. See for
example: Lillian D. Wald, The House on Henry Street, on the U. S.
Investigation of the Condition of Women and Child Wage Earners, p. 137,
N.Y. Child Labor Committee, p. 144.
[27] Proceedings of National Conference of Social Work, 1920, p. 171.
[28] Ibid., 1919, p. 613.
[29] Charities and the Commons, April, 1907, p. 577.
[30] American Year Book, 1919, p. 402.
[31] Roscoe Pound, at National Conference, 1919, p. 105.