The family : an ethnographical and historical outline with descriptive notes, planned as a text-book for the use of college lecturers and of directors of home-reading clubs / by Elsie Crews Parsons.

  • Parsons, Elsie Worthington Clews, 1874-1941.
Date:
1906
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: The family : an ethnographical and historical outline with descriptive notes, planned as a text-book for the use of college lecturers and of directors of home-reading clubs / by Elsie Crews Parsons. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    14/430 (page VI)
    vi Preface and university. An attempt in this direction is one of the two objects of this text-book. The systematic study of particular social groups is peculiarly fitted for the college curriculum. The classification of social facts from written records and personal observation demands maturer powers of ob¬ servation and analysis than any but the exceptional high school student possesses. Such a discipline is, however, on the other hand, essentially preliminary to university work. Much of the effort of university students in sociology, not to speak of other subjects, is futile because of their lack of training in scientific method.^ The family is, for several reasons, a particularly well-chosen subject for the elementary student of so¬ ciety. Many of the facts discussed have been part of his or her personal experience, and yet so different are the popular and the scientific points of view in regard to social facts that the student's power of ap¬ perception will be developed through numberless opportunities to consider long-known facts in wholly novel relations to one another. The subject calls for the classification of a pretty definite number of specific facts ; the descriptive work may be well defined and concise. And yet the family's function and structure are so closely connected with the social organisation in general that in their study an outlook is opened upon other social groups and upon the working of far- reaching social laws. No attempt has been made to give more than an ' Compare Steinmetz ; Classification des types sociaux et catalogue des peuples in Г année sociologique, 1898-1899, pp. 43-147, for this failure in method on the part of sociologists in general.