抄録
The study of social pathology analysed various social problems utilizing an approach which adopted the concepts of social disorganization, deviant behavior, anomie, and dysfunction. These analyses, focusing respectively on personality system, family system, and community system, have used the methods of control-group research, participant observation, and questionnaire. They took a common basis in an objective and relativistic view-point, which gradually made clear such points as the following.
(1) Standards and norms vary according to social classes.
(2) In order to solve some problem, it is necessary to proceed with an analysis of the larger system to which object of analysis belongs.
(3) Analysis of social disorganization and deviant behavior necessarily entails the study of non-conformity and social change.
Social welfare workers regard the problems they face as objects for solution, rather than merely for analysis. Although sociological analysis of such problems is important and necessary, in most cases it does not go beyond the explanation of the past and present causes and processes involved in the problems. The social welfare approach, on the other hand, consists in the practice of choosing what behavior the individual should take in the “future”, and in. assisting him to do so. Hence it is necessary that the social welfare worker be a specialist and that he take on responsibility for guiding individual. The social welfare approach, therefore, becomes really effective only when it is based on information gained from cooperative research with an objective and relativistic social science such as sociology, and when in addition it is connected into a “specialized practice”, in which a matter considered apart from a standpoint as an outsider. In order for this increase in the effectiveness of the social welfare approach, to take place hereafter, evaluations of the results both of various problems related to social change and of operations involving planned changes in the functioning of the social system will be more and more necessary.
