MERGER JOINS THREE SOCIAL SCIENCE FIELDS

Equipped with a clinical laboratory to delve into practical social problems in nearby cities, a new Department of Social Relations has been constructed under the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Dean Paul H. Buck announced yesterday.

The present paradox in having social and clinical psychology and social anthropology grouped under the heading of natural sciences is solved by divorcing these subjects from their former departments and incorporating them with the entire Sociology Department under the new title.

Move Initiated by Departments

Initiative for the move came from a special committee representing all three fields, headed by Talcott Parsons, professor of Sociology. The group explained that wartime experience had emphasized the unnecessary difficulties caused by the arbitrary barriers between researchers working on essentially the same problems.

This synthesis will culminate in the establishment of a research laboratory to be headed by Samuel A. Stouffer, newly appointed professor of Sociology, formerly of the University of Chicago, who will not get his release as a director of research in the Special Service Branch of the War Department until September.

To Investigate Local Conditions

Clinical and field research will lead to a study of local communities in order to analyze group conflict and prejudice, orientation of residential areas and designs for housing, development of patriotism and institutional spirit, comparisons of national backgrounds, and environmental influences on children.

Teaching will cross all these of the general areas of knowledge to examine entire cultures as working units with emphasis on man as a social being whose consciousness and behavior must be adjusted to all phases of modern culture, government, and technology.

Forty-seven-year-old Stouffer, a native of Iowa, received an M.A. here in 1923 after which he edited his home town paper, the Sac City Sun, for three years. Having studied at Chicago and the University of London, he taught at the University of Wisconsin, and was a full professor at Chicago from 1935 to 1941