What is a Social Problem?

Author(s): Hornell Hart

Source: American Journal of Sociology , Nov., 1923, Vol. 29, No. 3 (Nov., 1923), pp. 345-
352
Published by: The University of Chicago Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2764237

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 WHAT IS A SOCIAL PROBLEM?

HORNELL HART
Iowa Child Welfare Research Station

ABSTRACT
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 special-
ized 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 facilitated 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 technique, 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. Sociol-
ogy, as distinguished from the study of social problems, is concerned with the investiga-
tion of social origins, social structure and social processes. Social case work, as dis-
tinguished from social problems, is concerned with the treatment of the individual case
rather than the solution of group problems.

The subject of "social problems" has covered a somewhat vague

and amorphous field. Believing that the best approach toward the
conscious promotion of human progress is through research in this
field, the writer has undertaken a preliminary inductive study with
a view to a more accurate definition of the term and a clearer
statement of the relationship of social problems as a general subject
to sociology, to social work, and to special social problems.
The procedure in this study consisted in collecting a list of all
of the problems discussed in all of the available books and articles
published under the designation "social problems" or under more
or less equivalent terms, and the attempt to classify these problems
in as simple and logical a way as possible. The resulting outline
is as follows:

AN OUTLINE LIST OF THE LEADING SOCIAL PROBLEMS

A. Economic Problems: How can poverty and excessive wealth be minimized?

i. How may earnings be maximized and the cost of living minimized?
2. How may the output of industry and the psychic income of the con-
sumer, per unit produced, be maximized?

345

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346 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

3. What forms of taxation tend to stimulate the largest production and to

promote the most just distribution of wealth and incomes?
4. How may land and other natural resources be utilized with maximum
service to the community?
5. How can the ratio between population and natural resources be adjusted
at the most desirable point ?
6. In what other ways than by increasing real income can standards of
living be raised ?
7. What effects has immigration upon standards of living?
8. What factors determine the standards of living of negroes and how can
they be optimized ?
9. What are the best methods of caring for dependents and defectives ?
IO. How can undeserved misfortunes, such as widowhood, non-support,
desertion, unemployment, and invalidity, and the suffering therefrom,
be minimized?
ii. What influence upon standards of living may be expected from the
various forms of such actual or proposed institutions as social insurance
and pensions; birth control; profit sharing; government wage and
price regulation; collective bargaining; immigration restriction; the pro-
tective tariff; trusts and other combinations; scientific management;
co-operation in production and distribution; public ownership of public
utilities; socialism; and communism?
B. Health Problems: How may the average span of life be lengthened, health
be made more universal and more intense, and sickness be minimized?
I2. How may the germ plasm from which future generations are developed
be improved in quality?
I3. How may feeblemindedness, insanity, epilepsy, and other psychopathic
conditions, tuberculosis, venereal and other infectious diseases, alchohol-
ism and other drug addictions, be minimized?
I4. How may housing conditions, conditions of work, and recreational
surroundings be made most healthful?
i5. How may water, milk, and other elements in the food supply be kept
free from poisons and infections ?
i6. What influence upon health can be expected from such proposed
measures as health insurance; school, industrial, and other types of
medical examinations; health centers; open air schools; the socializa-
tion of medicine; institutional care; birth control, sterilization or
segregation of defectives; minimization of war; eugenics ?
C. Political and Socio-psychological Problems: How can human relationships
be made most conducive to the general welfare?
I7. How may crime be minimized and respect for law be maximized?
i8. How may happy marriages be promoted and unhappy marriages and
divorce be minimized?

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 WHAT IS A SOCIAL PROBLEM? 347

ig. How may misery due to illegitimate births be minimized?

20. How may happy and wholesome home life for children be maximized?
2I. How may loneliness, misunderstanding, quarreling, and conflict be
minimized, and fellowship be maximized?
22. How may relations between employers and employees be so adjusted
as to give each the opportunity for the fullest personal development,
and still promote efficient production?
23. What are the most desirable relationships between government and
capital and labor?
24. What relationship should exist between private initiative and govern-
mental control?
25. How may the conflicting interests of such groups as agriculturalists and
manufacturers, and producers and consumers, be adjusted for the best
interests of all ?
26. How may lynching, peonage, and other forms of racial injustice be
minimized and racially and nationally conflicting elements be brought
into harmonious co-operation?
27. What forms of government and what relationships between city, state,
and national governments are most conducive to social welfare?
28. What types of suffrage and what electoral methods are socially most
desirable under given conditions?
29. How may backward and undeveloped countries be brought to make their
maximum contribution to world welfare, with a minimum of limitation
of the freedom of the inhabitants ?
30. How may war be minimized and international co-operation be maxi-
mized ?
3I. What effects upon social relationships may be expected from such
measures and programs as adult and juvenile probation; indeterminate
sentence; juvenile courts; parole; self-governnment schemes among
convicts and among students; Americanization; strict divorce laws;
city manager government; anarchy; secret organizations like the
Ku Klux Klan; guild socialism; the soviet type of government;
city planning; the League of Nations; protectorates; universal
military training; mandates; military "preparedness"; and the like?

D. Educational Problems: By what social means may individual personalities

be most enriched and rendered most serviceable to society?
32. By what methods and to what extent should existing social traditions,
conventions, and institutions be modified with a view to promoting
progress ?
33. What types of personalities are most useful to society and what types
are most dangerous; how may these types be identified and measured;
and what educational methods will maximize the desirable types and
minimize the undesirable?

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348 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

34. What information and what methods are most important for children
of various types to learn ?
35. How may the educational advantages offered be adjusted to the individ-
ual needs of the children ?
36. How may retarded children be dealt with to the best interests of them-
selves and of society ?
37. How may maximum development and utilization of unusual abilities
be achieved?
38. How may the learning process be made most efficient?
39. Through what agencies and by what methods should religious and
moral training be given?
40. How may children best be given necessary information on sex problems ?
4I. What are the relative values of interest as compared with discipline, of
information as compared with the acquisition of skill, of practical as
compared with cultural education?
42. How may children be protected from such premature, excessive, or
improper occupations as interfere with their maximum development ?
43. How may young people entering industry best be guided into the
occupations most fitted to their personalities ?
44. How may gainful occupations be adjusted, with minimum loss in produc-
tivity, so as to have the maximum interest and cultural value to the
persons occupied ?
45. How may adults gainfully occupied be given the maximum opportunity
for education ?
46. How may parents best be prepared for their responsibilities toward
their children ?
47. How may the best opportunities be offered for the enrichment of person-
ality in leisure time ?
48. What degree and type of freedom of speech, freedom of the press,
freedom of art, freedom of teaching, and freedom of pteaching best
promote social welfare?
49. How may the channels of publicity be kept free from obstruction or
pervelsion by selfish interests ?
50. How far should the functions of the home be transferred to the school
and to other outside institutions, and what relationship between school
and home is most conducive to child welfare?
5I. What influence upon the success of educational ideals have such
measures, methods or systems as the Gary plan; the Montessori plan;
junior high schools; consolidation of rural schools; departmentaliza-
tion; industrial education; visiting teachers; mental tests; achieve-
ment tests and measuring scales; the socialized recitation; the project
method; interscholastic athletics; social centers and playgrounds;
public parks and museums?

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 WHAT IS A SOCIAL PROBLEM? 349

Such a list may readily be attacked as being so vastly compre-

hensive as to be valueless. Yet it is difficult if not impossible to
pick out from the above list any problem which has not repeatedly
been discussed in textbooks on social problems or in magazines
devoted to social problems. The fact is that one cannot be an
intelligent citizen without at least a casual acquaintance with almost
all of these problems, and one cannot satisfactorily investigate any
one of them without studying its interrelationships with a great
number of the others. Some such list as this must be accepted as
a basis for research and for citizenship.
A definition of social problems comprehending those in the above
list emerges from a study of them. "A social problem is a problem
which actually or potentially afects large numbers of people in a
common way so that it may best be solved by some measure or measures
applied to the problem as a whole rather than by dealing with each
individual as an isolated case, or which requires concerted or organized
human action." To illustrate, typhoid fever is a social problem
because its prevention depends upon purification of water and food
supplies and upon concerted adoption of antityphoid vaccination,
rather than merely upon nursing and medical attendance for those
afflicted. Immigration is a social problem in that it is regulated
by legislation applied to the problem as a whole, and in that even
in dealing with individual immigrants organized group action
through governmental or private agencies is necessary.
Successful solution of any given social problem cannot be
achieved apart from the work of highly specialized experts. With-
out the researches of the bacteriologist, typhoid could not have
been conquered. Criminology cannot be treated or prevented
without such expert aid as that of the psychiatrist, of the trained
probation officer, and of the soecialized recreational worker. Thus
the social problems listed above are being stulied and treated by
a wide variety of specialists, including economists, physicians,
nurses, criminologists, educators, publicists, government executives,
legislators, engineers, psychologists, social case workers, labor
organizers and numerous others. This inevitable specialization
renders absurd any pretention that a comprehensive science of
social problems could displace the various specific techniques.

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350 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

For two reasons, however, the development of an integrated

science of social problems is urgently required. First, it is essential
that the public in general, and particularly the specialists them-
selves, should be informed as to the basic facts regarding all the
important social problems. Second, the use of sociological statistics
is a vital but neglected aid toward the understanding of any of the
social problems, and this technique has so much in common for
all of the specialities, and so much which differentiates it from non-
social statistics, that its development as a definite science is called
for.
As to the need for widespread knowledge on social problems,
it is unnecessary to dwell upon the importance of informed public
opinion as an aid to the securing and enforcement of social legisla-
tion. A point less generally appreciated is the futility of attempting
to investigate or to treat any social problem without a fairly thor-
ough knowledge of allied problems. The worker for child-labor
legislation needs accurate and comprehensive acquaintance with
the findings of psychologists, of educators, of nutritional workers,
of recreational specialists, of industrial efficiency engineers, of
economists, and of other experts before he can arrive at safe basic
principles on which to formulate his legislative program. The
worker in any specialized health field lacks essential data needed
in the investigation and treatment of his problem unless he is thor-
oughly familiar with the economic aspects of standards of living.
Similarly each of the special problems interlocks inextricably with
other specialized problems, and cannot be intelligently attacked
by itself.
A further imperative reason for co-ordinating the study of the
various social problems is the applicability of statistical technique
to all of them, and the necessity of developing social statistics as
a definite subject distinct from other braches of mathematics but
comprehensive enough to include all of the statistical methods
used in studying any of the social problems. Social reform move-
ments have suffered tremendously in their effectiveness through
lack of accurate quantitative methods of studying their data.
Statistics is the only available method of quantitative analysis of
phenomena in which the causal factors are so complex, or so imper-

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 WHAT IS A SOCIAL PROBLEM? 35I

fectly understood, or so incapable of being controlled, that they

cannot be kept constant at assigned values in investigating the
problem. For instance, if one wishes to study the relationship
between infant mortality and the earnings of the father, the statis-
tical method is the only available quantitative technique for attack-
ing the problem, since there are so many unknown or unmeasured or
uncontrollable factors, other than fathers' earnings, affecting infant
mortality.
Three subdivisions of social statistics have already shown
themselves. The first comprises the methods used by the biologists
and psychologists in which simple and partial correlations between
measurements or scores predominate. The second is the technique
used by economists and business barometricians in which correla-
tions between time series predominate. The third is the technique
employed by criminologists, vital statisticians, and others, in which
the dominant method involves merely the analysis of association
between characters without the use of elaborate correlational tech-
nique. These three fields are quite distinct in practice and fairly
distinct in subject-matter, but they all utilize the same fundamental
mathematical theorems relating to probability, they all borrow
each other's methods, and they all would profit from greater unifi-
cation in the subject of social statistics.
Since, then, social problems constitute properly a definite and
more or less unified field for study and research, it may be well to
suggest briefly the objectives of such study, and the distinctions
between social problems, sociology, and social work. Broadly,
the objective of the study of social problems may be stated as the
discovery of how to minimize undesirable social conditions and how
to maximize desirable conditions, The student of social problems
seeks methods of minimizing disease and maximizing health, of
minimizing poverty and maximizing enriched standards of living,
of minimizing social friction and maximizing social co-operation, of
minimizing ignorance and maximizing intelligence and culture.
Sociology, as distinguished from the study of social problems,
is concerned with social origins, social structures, and social pro-
cesses. These branches of theoretical or pure sociology, covering
such subjects as the nature and basis of human association, the origin

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352 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

and evolution of the family, the evolution and diffusion of culture,

and the psychology of group behavior, provide an essential back-
ground for the student of social problems, and often suggest
hypotheses to be investigated, but do not offer definite solutions
for specific problems.
Social case work attacks social problems, individual by individual
or family by family. This method provides invaluable experience
with concrete problems, and frequently (in spite of the fact that
it is concerned primarily with immediate relief and with individual
or family reconstruction) it rouses intelligent interest in social
problems to the point of seeking improvements in the social system
which will prevent individual cases of misery from arising.

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