THE PARTICIPANT OBSERVER IN COMMUNITY STUDJES.

SOCIOLOGY; RESEARCH; COMMUNITIES; ETHICS; CULTURE; CIVILIZATION

Sociological research at nearly every point is pressed and twisted by the logic of the moral order from which the investigator has emerged. Conscious or unconscious as the person may be of his initial bias, the fact remains that the knowledge of local communities within the large urban scene bears the normative imprint of what we regard as the conventional social order. The mystery and fascination of his subject, which alone offers solace to the astronomer and which in more or less degree is countenanced in other fields not so "human," is either absent in social research or too often repressed by the questions raised in a differing cultural experience. As products of a moral order, and too often the dominant or conventional one, the studies of the local community lean toward the strange and bizarre, toward that which differentiates and hence explains the inadequacies or shortcomings of the situation, as compared with one which epitomizes conventional living.