Main trends of research in the social and human ... - unesdoc - Unesco

598 Pierre de Bie
tures of these surveys; sociologists and welfare officers worked alongside social
psychologists, economists and criminologists. This co-operation appears to
have been inevitable, since the surveys covered local communities or problems
such as poverty, delinquency and unemployment, which have manifold aspects.
The authors of the surveys were convinced that it was not possible to separate
family life from professional life, work activities from leisure activities, and
the economic aspects of problems from their psychological ones; they were also
convinced that an approach through a single, specialized branch of science could
only produce a fragmentary view of the problems involved, which would not
be adequate for the formulation of proposals and the taking of decisions re-
garding action. Undoubtedly, when it is a question of solving a problem
bearing on social and economic development, it is essential to look beyond the
horizons of one specialized discipline. It quickly becomes evident that many
links exist between elements which a specialized monodisciplinary scientific
analysis would be liable to separate, and the natural impulse is to go beyond
the frontiers of particular disciplines in order to get a more general and complete
picture.
At the present time, the investigations which are most closely allied to social
surveys, though without being consciously conducted along the same lines, are
undoubtedly those which relate to local communities and urban or regional
development. The horizon has, however, broadened out, specialists are now
looking beyond their national territory, and there is also the extremely rich and
varied range of studies on economic and social development in the developing
countries.
Different terms, sometimes varying according to the size of the unit under
observation, are here used to describe areas of concerted study and action:
community development, local community studies, regional investigations,
physical planning, surveys in developing countries, etc. The bibliographies on
investigations in these domains reveal the existence of a wide variety of special-
ists. The volume Industrialization and Society, the result of an international
conference on the social implications of industrialization and technological
change - a question of the greatest importance for the developing countries -
contains papers by sociologists, economists, demographers, social and cultural
anthropologists, and political scientists. Joint participation in this task was es-
sential.30
In a study on sociology in developing areas, Wilbert E. Moore has shown
how, depending on the size of the unit under consideration, different specialists
had to be brought in to work together on the investigation under way. For sur-
veys centred on the development of local communities, recourse is had to rural
sociologists and social anthropologists, often assisted by social welfare workers
and teachers, and even a great variety of other specialists such as dietitians,
doctors and agricultural experts. At the national level, however, ,economists
are the ones who are likely to play a leading role, but to them might added demo-
graphers, statisticians, political scientists and administrators.3 I