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The purpose of this paper is to suggest a procedure for constructing a city theology which effectively deals with the two major problems confronted in developing such a typology (1) the selection of dimensions 'along which cities vary in a relatively uniform way, and (2) the formation of homogeneous groups of cities on the basis of these dimensions jointly considered. The procedure suggested in this paper consists of uniting findings from previous research on the "selection of dimensions" problem with hierarchical grouping cluster analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades limited research attention has been given to those smallest population centers, beyond the individual farmstead, commonly referred to as hamlets. Alluding to this fact, the following statement made in 1943 by the geographer, Glenn T. Trewartha, is still indicative of the situation: "… one of the most numerous and widespread settlement types in the United States, the unincorporated hamlet, does not deserve the near oblivion that has been accorded it by geographers and other workers in the social sciences." The lack of research interest may be attributed partially to the dimunition of the farm population and rural institutions and the increasing significance of industrialization and urban development. Because of these and other changes, students of society may share the opinion that hamlets are rapidly disappearing and consequently not worthy of study. Various studies, however, are not in agreement concerning whether or not hamlets have increased or decreased in size and numbers. According to Fuguitt, the contradictory findings stem from the fact that previous researchers have not made "a clear distinction between (1) changes in population size categories over time, and (2) changes in individual places over time." In a study based on Census data, Fuguitt examined Wisconsin's incorporated small towns for the period 1880-1960. He simultaneously analyzed the two analytical components indicated above through the use of the Markov model. His general conclusion was: "While fewer small towns are being 'born' these days, they aren't 'dying,' but are growing up to be big towns, in some cases." Although it is possible, as Fuguitt also suggests, that small unincorporated places are declining in size and number, there is little reported data to suggest they are rapidly diminishing as a rural collectivity or settlement center in contemporary society. In general, the purpose of this paper is to make a contribution to our descriptive knowledge of hamlets. Initially, an effort is made to determine the main activity pursued by the principal family supporters within or near the hamlet area. Secondly, based on the major activity pursued by each resident family's primary income recipient, a statistically derived typology of hamlets is described. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The border-states of Missouri and Kentucky currently present a picture of incomplete racial desegregation of the public schools. Roughly 64 percent of the counties with Negroes in each of these states had started or had plans by May 1957 for some racial integration in education. Questions immediately arise as to the possible differences between desegregating counties and those maintaining complete segregation. The present paper relates this scattered design of segregated and integrated counties to three demographic variables. Two principal factors have been held by educators and social scientists as crucial in school integration—urbanism and Negro ratio. A third demographic variable, economic prosperity, is closely related to urbanism and Negro ratio and often cited as independently important in race relations. The mixed pattern of acceptance of public school integration is in important part a function of a number of demographic factors. Urbanism and economic prosperity appear to be crucial variables. All 24 of the predominantly urban counties in the two states are desegregating, and even the partly urban counties are more often desegregating than totally rural counties.

One of the ubiquitous trends in social behavior is the formation of comprehensive systems of interaction known as communities. Everywhere in the world and throughout man's existence on earth, the formation of communities has been evident, from the primitive tribe to the contemporary nation-state. Among the exciting developments within the more complex communities of mankind, such as cities and nations, is the emergence of subcommunity forms which both complement and contest the arrangements of the larger society. Status communities and ethnic communities of many sorts belong among the contemporary sub-communities. It is instructive to apply this concept of sub-community formation to areas of behavior such as the worlds of art and jazz, when that behavior can be shown to approach closure and completeness with respect to a distinctive way of life. This paper deals with two major tasks: (1) the development of a special theory of the jazz community as an unique form of status community, and (2) a judgment as to the validity of referring to the social world of the jazz musician as a community. It should be mentioned that while this formulation is conceived in terms of the jazz subculture, it also has widespread application elsewhere in the area of social deviance. Since the concept of status group has its roots in the general theory of community, we shall briefly outline that concept. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of the present paper is to test empirically the covariation between a few partial measures applying to ecological distance on the one hand, and to geographical distance on the other, within a given area of investigation, viz the city of Stockholm, Sweden, in 1947. The distance in question is the distance from the centre of the city. The investigation was planned as part of a sociological study of the city of Stockholm, the data used covering the years 1945-4950. Result of the study seems to indicate that the geographical distance is, with certain adjustments, a barely acceptable measure to be applied to the ecological distance in zone divisions within the area investigated, but only provided a rough division is considered sufficient. At the same time the study diminishes the importance of substituting geographical distance for ecological distance in the actual ecological analyses of Stockholm of the given time. It provides two partial measures of ecological distance which could be used in the analyses as well.

The article focuses on the published definitions of the science in order to determine areas of agreement and disagreement and then suggests principles for eliminating whatever disagreement exists. There seems to be no feasible way of securing a truly random sample of all the definitions which have ever been proposed in writing. The universe to be sampled is nowhere listed in readily available form as, for example, the population of a city is listed in the city directory. Definitions are scattered throughout an enormous literature of books, pamphlets, dissertations and periodicals, some of which could not be located without very great difficulty. For the study all definitions which turned up in two or three years of intermittent search were jotted down on slips of paper. Only formal definitions were considered. Therefore no attempt was made to interpret the mind of those writers who did not commit themselves explicitly. No definition was eliminated because it was logically defective or because the writer disagreed with it.

This article focuses on the author's study on making personal contacts in the study of a Puerto Rican community. The first part of the paper will deal with the broader aspects of the problem of making personal contacts that the author has deduced from this study; the second part will be a case report of several experiences that actually had in the making of personal contacts along with brief comments on the outcome of these contacts. The first premise upon which this article rests is that the investigator is in quest of accurate and significant data in sufficient quantity to satisfy inductive requirements. The second and corollary premise is that the fulfillment of these ends requires that a method of meeting and securing the confidence of persons in the community be employed that will minimize interpersonal distance between the investigator and the persons with whom contacts are to be made. The process of meeting and making friends of prospective informants, so as to assure that data can be obtained, and obtained with a reasonable assurance of its accuracy, is an art.

The article presents some abstracts of published materials concerning economics and social sciences. The paper entitled "Some Problems of Research in Social Sciences and Humanities in India," by M.H. Gopal deals with the problems of teaching and training at the Master's and still higher levels in Indian Universities, with reference to promotion and coordination of research, the measures to increase the number of researchers and to improve their quality, and the problems of more mature researchers. It also discusses the steps for bringing about better coordination of research at the intra and inter-university levels and the national levels. The paper entitled "Rivers and Central Places: Analogous Systems?," by M.J. Woldenberg and B.J.L. Berry discusses both central-place and river systems which are viewed as open systems with analogous allometric growth processes operating and similar allometric steady-states. Thus, an urban system is characterized by a rank-size distribution of sizes and doubly logarithmic relations between city characteristics and similar relations exist in the geometrical characteristics of river systems.

The article cites a paper published in the current issue of this periodical that focuses on problems of cities and towns in the United States and presents the author's views on such problems. According to the author, the small city and the town are problems alongside the larger cities. The author reveals that the policy of this periodical will be to emphasize the social aspects of municipal administration.

In this article the authors attempt to analyze urban interrelations pertaining to economic structure. It is hoped that a better understanding of the economic interrelations within the urban-metropolitan region will emerge, making it possible to discard the crude rule-of-thumb procedures used by many social scientists in attempting to anticipate changes in the economic base and growth potentialities of urban areas. The authors utilize input-output methods which have been developed by W. Leontief, and for which data and materials have been collected, classified, and prepared for operation by the Interindustry Division of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The authors have briefly sketched a way of viewing economic interrelations within metropolitan regions. The authors have stated the importance of the export sector, for clearly, cities and not merely economic organisms; nevertheless they feel that this conception is a valid one. It focuses attention upon the process by which employment in the basic export industries is associated with employment and output in other industries. This partly explains how the city functions from an economic point of view, and it allows to anticipate change in the economic structure of urban areas in a more rigorous, operational manner.

This article investigates the rural-urban continuum through the comparison of two different Guttman scales of service institutions. One scale was developed by Swedner for communities in southwestern Sweden while the other was an original scale of service institutions that the authors developed for communities in Colorado. Since both scales provided an ordering of services, a comparison can be made between their relative ordering of similar service institutions. The differences between the two communities found by the authors were: a.) communities in Colorado were relatively younger than those in Sweden; b.) the selection of agglomerations in Sweden was influenced by the presence of a railway station, post office, or parish church, whereas Colorado communities were selected randomly; c.) the differences between the two social and political systems allow a greater involvement at the local level by the Swedish national government. This study has provided additional support for the assertion that a patterned sequence of services characterized communities ordered along the rural-urban continuum.

This investigation used data collected in three countries: Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. The data indicate that rural migrants tended to be upwardly mobile in the urban areas, although they might not reach the occupational levels attained by urbanites. Rurality of the communities where migrants were born did not explain their social mobility. Neither the age at migration nor present age accounted for the mobility or lack of mobility of migrants. Education seemed to be the most important variable in the explanation of social mobility, but even this factor had limited value. If, when they first migrated, rural migrants were disadvantaged in comparison with urbanites, they appeared to overcome most of this disadvantage in time. These findings question the degree to which explanations derived from studies of migration in industrial nations are applicable to ’developing nations.’ [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This concern with informal groups in an urban environment has attracted a number of sociologists. A large proportion of the work in urban sociology until 1940 emphasized the lack of integration in the city which was believed to be the result of a lack of informal group membership. This theme was stressed particularly by sociologists of the Chicago school of that period as represented by Park and later by Wirth and Redfield. One of the major criticisms of Wirth and others of the Chicago school is that they exaggerated the degree of secularization and disorganization that supposedly typifies urban communities. Sociologists recently have become interested in the urban informal group as an important contributor to the integration of the city. Research of this nature indicates that informal groups continue to play an important role in the maintenance of the social system as a whole. Actually, Janowitz, Axelrod, Whyte, and others, on the basis of their research in American cities, claim that cities are highly organized and that many informal networks of social relationships exist which were overlooked by earlier writers. Other sociologists, dealing with the role of informal group participation as a means of relating the urbanite to the larger community, have discovered strong kinship and neighborhood ties in those areas of the city where such relationships were often assumed to be quite weak. The main interest in this research is to see to what extent the conventional and more recent views of urbanism are exemplified in a modem metropolitan community. This is not to say that the present study can resolve this critical problem; rather, it may contribute to the development of a more general agreement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Ad Hoc Committee on Humanities was appointed by the president of the American Sociological Association following the 1963 meeting of the Association. Establishment of the Committee followed a request from the Commission on the Humanities for a brief report covering present relationships between sociology and the humanities and foreseeable needs of sociology, financial as well as organizational, to broaden these relationships. The Ad Hoc Committee delivered its report in January 1964 to the Commission and it is to appear in the printed document that the Commission will submit to government officials, foundations, learned societies and universities in support of its request for stronger support for the humanities. Although the majority of sociologists shows no more evidence in their works of affinity with the humanities than do the majority of scientists generally, the tie between sociology and humanities is visible, perhaps more so indeed than in most of the social sciences. Some of the richest ideas or perspectives of modern sociology — urbanism, stratification, alienation, community — have been among the richest themes of the modern novel and drama, not to mention other areas of the humanities.