Applied Social Research, History of

Sara M Strickhouser and James D Wright, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, USA
2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Abstract

The history of applied social research is reviewed. The social sciences generally are a product of the Enlightenment and most
of the social sciences originated in applied concerns. Thus, in contrast to the conventional view that the basic science is
developed rst and then applied to solving certain problems, most of the social sciences developed in the opposite direction:
in the effort to understand and solve various social problems (education, crime, poverty, pestilence), the pioneers of the
social sciences developed the theories, concepts, and methods that came eventually to comprise the basic disciplines. The
history of applied social research is, indeed, the history of the social sciences themselves.

At the most general level, our topic is the historical relationship
between basic and applied social science. Many discussions of
this relationship posit the development of the basic scientic
discipline its theories, concepts, methods, and corpus of
ndings as the necessary rst step, and then the application of
those theories, methods, and ndings to problems of direct
practical importance as a derivative activity, as an inferior or at
least much less glamorous second step. Our thesis is that the
historical development of the social sciences tended to follow
an exactly opposite pattern. The earliest social science was
developed by practical people seeking solutions to the pressing
social problems of their day. Most of the social sciences were
applied enterprises long before they developed as basic
scientic disciplines.
Origins
The idea of social science emerged during and immediately
after the Enlightenment, as a way to provide answers to ques-
tions about how individuals and institutions would cope with
modernization, industrialization, mass political participation,
the end of aristocracy, secularization, the spread of capitalism,
the growth of the natural sciences, and, more generally, the end
of traditional society. The Enlightenment, Edward Shils says,
was antithetical to tradition (1981: 325) the very traditions
which, then and now, are conducive to an ordered life.
Without substantive traditions, how would modern societies
function? What new bases of order would emerge? What, if
anything, would prevent a widely ramifying disorder? Would
social life even be possible?
Scholars who eventually came to be dened as the founders
of the disciplines of sociology, psychology, economics, polit-
ical science, and even geography, and anthropology were all
searching for an explanation of the post-Enlightenment world.
Capitalism, science, democracy, and secularization were busily
creating a new social order in the late-seventeenth and eigh-
teenth centuries. By the nineteenth century, the Enlightenment
ideas of reason, individualism, and freedom had created
a nascent social science whose object was both to explain and
justify this new order.
Those now considered the founders of the various social
science disciplines all lived and worked at approximately the
same time in history. Max Weber (sociology, 18641920),
William Wundt (psychology, 18321920), and Franz Boas
(anthropology, 18581942) were all born within three decades
of each other. Adam Smith, arguably the founder of modern
economics, was a century earlier (172390); and ditto Alex-
ander von Humboldt (17691859), arguably the founder of
scientic geography. The social sciences as we know them today
were birthed in the tumultuous period between 1750 and
1900, a period that includes the American and French Revo-
lutions, the emergence of socialism, the unications of
Germany and Italy, the eclipse of aristocracy and the spread of
mass democracy, and the political uprisings of 1848 on the
Continent. This period simultaneously saw a shift in the
scientic climate, where previously accepted thoughts and
observations were challenged and empirical evidence was
demanded.
Our point is that the questions the founders rst asked were
practical questions addressed to what we now call applied
concerns. These applied concerns are the foundation of these
disciplines as we know them today. As Alfred Marshall says
(specically about economics but more generally about all the
social sciences), these disciplines are the study of mankind in
the ordinary business of life (Marshall, 2011[1920]). They
were not created for the purpose of producing theory-laden
ideas in an icy laboratory or comfortable ivory tower but
rather lively, warm-blooded, practical ideas that would not
only explain, but also improve upon the welfare of society and
everyone in it (Byrne, 2011).
The Enlightenment and the massive social transformations
that ensued were important to the development of the social
sciences both historically and conceptually. The rise of
democracy and mass political behavior invested individuals
and their actions with a new signicance democracy implied
that the rulers were no more important than the ruled.
Understanding variability in the behavior of individuals and
locating those behaviors within specic social and institutional
contexts became the leitmotif of a new breed of intellectual
not the philosopher, not the natural historian, but rather the
social scientist. A century later, disciplinary lines of differenti-
ation emerged, but the earliest of this new breed of scholar had
wide-ranging interests in what we would now recognize as
psychology, history, economics, sociology indeed, the entire
gamut of contemporary social science disciplines.
If the behavior of individuals was now of interest, then so
too were their well-being, political outlooks, their views on

850 International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Volume 1 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.03051-8

economy and society, all of which became fodder for social
scientic explanations of everyday life. As Jeroen Jansz (2004:
29) explains, Rather than brute imposition of social order or
religiously inspired charity, social management became infused
with notions of rational, scientic social planning. Social
management, not social theory, was the initial basis for what
became social science as we know it. The animating concerns
were things like crime and how to reduce it, education and how
to increase it, poverty and how it might be eliminated, and on
through a very large list of practical, applied concerns. The
challenge was a data-based understanding of the world as it
was, not the development of some concrete, general, and
unwavering social theory that appeared to govern the
happenings of society. A general theory of how the social world
works was eventually the outcome, but by no means the origins
of the applied work and concerns of the real founders of the
social science disciplines.
Our intention here is not to debunk the importance of the
traditional founders in the development of their respective
disciplines, but rather to point out the applied and practical
concerns of many of them to highlight applied origins and
demonstrate that what is now considered applied research is the
precondition to the development of these disciplines as we know
them today. Mainly, we aim to encourage modern contributors
to these disciplines to pay homage to their applied roots.
Sociology
Johan Goudsblom and Johan Heilbron (2015), this Encyclo-
pedia, argue that American sociology developed primarily on
the basis of empirical research into current social problems. The
main topics were the issues which were widely debated by
politicians, religious leaders and social reformers: massive
immigration, urbanization, industrialization, local communi-
ties, social (dis)integration, ethnic and race relations. Empirical
studies proliferated, based either on statistical material or on
actual eldwork. By the 1920s the sociology department in
Chicago, founded by Albion Small in 1893, had become the
predominant center. And while American sociology is not
quite the same as sociology in general, this is a useful obser-
vation with which to begin.
If one were to ask the typical graduate student in sociology
to name the founders of the discipline, most would respond
almost instinctively: Marx, Weber, and Durkheim. A few might
add Comte or Spencer to the list. And yet a recent paper by one
of us (Wright, 2009) was entitled, The Founding Fathers of
Sociology: Francis Galton, Adolphe Quetelet, and Charles Booth; Or:
What Do People You Probably Never Heard of Have to Do with the
Foundations of Sociology? (From whence much of the following
discussion is adapted.) How, if at all, can these conicting
visions be resolved?
The notion that sociology began as a theoretical discipline
originating in the ideas of European scholars such as Max
Weber or Emile Durkheim is mainly due to the American Tal-
cott Parsons, whose The Structure of Social Action (1937) and
Social System (1951) pretty well dened the history of the
discipline as it was taught in graduate departments from the
1950s forward. The 1937 book was particularly inuential and
was dominated by exegeses on Weber, Marshall, Pareto, Freud,
Applied Social Research, History of 851
and Durkheim. A like view of the discipline is promulgated in
Robert Nisbets well-known The Sociological Tradition, rst
published in 1966. Both Parsons and later Nisbet described the
theoretical discipline as though it were the discipline in its
totality and thus downplayed what Anthony Oberschall calls
The Establishment of Empirical Sociology (1972), which owes
a great deal more to, say, Galton, Quetelet, and Booth than to
Marx, Weber, and Durkheim.
Even were we to grant that sociology was somehow foun-
ded by the Big Three, we would also need to grant that all of
them were motivated by strongly applied concerns. Emile
Durkheim (18581917), for example, is often credited with
making sociology a science by insisting that social facts can
only be explained by other social facts, a proposition suggest-
ing that the individual acquires characteristics from society and
not the other way around, thus appearing to deny the very idea
of the individual in a radical way. It is true that Durkheims
many scholarly works and his founding and editing of the rst
journal of sociology, LAnne Sociologique, helped establish
sociology as an accepted social science. But as George Ritzer has
pointed out, Durkheim was quite open about suggesting social
reforms based on his observations of the dismal state of
education and the effects of the division of labor on social
solidarity (Ritzer, 2011: 103, 106). Suicide too was dominated
by practical concerns. The concluding passage of the rst
chapter expressed Durkheims aspirations for the work, to
discover the means that can be used to counteract [suicide]
(1951[1897]: 52).
Max Weber (18641920) was known to his contemporaries
primarily as a historian and an economist. Today, we tend to
think of Weber as an abstract thinker, a theoretician, but he was
intimately engaged in practical affairs and German politics: for
example, he was a member of the German delegation during
the peace negotiations in Versailles and a member of the
committee that drafted the Weimar Constitution that paved the
way for Hitlers ascension to power a decade or so later. Paul
Honigsheims The Unknown Max Weber (2000) refers to Weber
as a rural sociologist and elsewhere as a historian of agricul-
tural and rural life. It is hard to quarrel with the conclusion that
Webers applied sociology has been given short shrift (Swatos
et al., 1998), due largely to Parsons myopic insistence that
Weber was more important as a theorist than as a practicing
hands-on social scientist.
As for the third of the Big Three, Karl Marx, little need be
said beyond the inevitable quotation from the Theses on
Feuerbach: The philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the
world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it
(1969[1845]).
Venerated as these historical gures are, just what aspects of
their work survive in contemporary sociology? Marx probably
remains the most inuential of the batch, although Marxian
sociological themes have fallen out of favor in recent years. No
one writes about suicide without a tip of the hat to Durkheim,
but do the Rules of Sociological Method, the Elementary Forms of
the Religious Life, or even The Division of Labor in Society still
inform much current sociological research or practice? Weber,
of course, lives on in studies of bureaucracy and in studies of
class, status, and power, and his Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
Capitalism is a hardy perennial in undergraduate social theory
classes, but beyond that, what?
852 Applied Social Research, History of
Consider, in sharp contrast, Sir Francis Galton (1822
1911), a contemporary of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim. At
various points in his career, he would have been described as an
anthropologist, sociologist, explorer, geographer, meteorolo-
gist, geneticist, psychometrician, psychologist, criminologist,
and statistician, among others. There is not a single reference to
Galton in Nisbets 350 ponderous pages and it appears that few
sociologists have ever heard of him. And yet his intellectual
contributions include the following:
l According to Karl Pearson, Galton invented the concept of
statistical correlation (Pearson, 1914).
l Galton was the rst to apply statistical methods to the study
of human differences and the inheritance of intelligence.
l Galton introduced the use of questionnaires and surveys for
collecting data on human communities, which he
employed in his genealogical and biographical works and
for anthropometric studies. In an important sense, he
invented the modern survey questionnaire and other
features of the modern survey.
l He coined the phrase nature versus nurture and was the
rst person to study genetic inheritance versus environ-
mental conditioning and socialization as determinants of
human characteristics.
l He is also considered the founder of psychometrics (the
science of measuring mental faculties and psychological
and socialpsychological properties).
l In the late-1860s, Galton conceived the concept of the
standard deviation.
l Galton also invented ordinary least squares regression and
the use of the regression line; he was also the rst to describe
and explain the common phenomenon of regression
toward the mean.
l In the 1870s and 1880s, he pioneered the use of the normal
distribution to t histograms of actual tabulated data. He
also discovered the properties of the bivariate normal
distribution and its relationship to regression analysis.
It does not overstate to say that any current issue of the
American Sociological Review (or, for that matter, the American
Political Science Review, the American Economic Review indeed,
any current journal in any social science discipline published
anywhere in the world!) would owe as large an intellectual and
historical debt to the Galton corpus just summarized as it would
owe the Big Three combined. Contemporary social science, as it
is actually practiced, is inconceivable without reference to
Galtons techniques, concepts, and statistical theories.
What motives drove Galton to this dizzying string of
discoveries and breakthroughs? Clearly, the motives were
practical, not theoretical. Galtons passion was the statistical
study of variations in human ability. The fundamental obser-
vation that drove his scientic work was that some people
possessed talent in great abundance, and others, barely at all.
What accounts for that variation and could anything be done
about it? A more practical concern is difcult to conjure! As
James Newman (1956) put it in his monumental history of
mathematics, Galton was essentially a social reformer,
imbued with a strong sense of social responsibility and of
mission (p. 450).
Adolphe Quetelet (17961894) was another contemporary
of the founders and one of the most inuential social scientists
of the nineteenth century. He expanded a eld of investigation
that he termed moral statistics, a eld originally identied as
political arithmetic by English economist and philosopher Sir
William Petty in the late-seventeenth century. Like Galton,
Quetelet was a pioneer in the use of statistical reasoning to
study social phenomena and as such, he profoundly inuenced
the course of European and eventually American social science.
It is of some signicance that when Paul Lazarsfeld was given
a named chair at Columbia in 1962, the name he chose was the
Quetelet Professor of Social Science.
Quetelet is rarely mentioned in modern-day histories of the
development of social science, but his efforts to apply proba-
bility theory and statistical analysis to data on crime, suicide,
and anthropometry were pioneering efforts whose progeny
include criminology in its contemporary quantitative form.
Nisbets history of sociology identies Quetelet as one of the
political arithmeticians who compiled quantities of social
statistics, pointing to correlations or patterns, and preening
themselves on the quantitative exactitude of their handiwork.
From this, one would never know that Quetelet was a vener-
ated gure throughout the nineteenth century, among empir-
ical researchers in Victorian England and on the Continent
(Cole, 1972).
What Nisbet (2004) described as preening was in fact
a near-obsession with accurate measurements of human char-
acteristics. Quetelet believed that if measurements were suf-
ciently accurate, then observed sample values could be used to
infer properties of entire populations. He did not quite grasp
our modern concept of statistical inference, but as can be
plainly seen, he came very close. He applied these concepts to
statistics on crime, mortality, weight, disease, intelligence,
occupations, levels of education, religious afliation,
economics, and other phenomena. His emphasis on accuracy
in measurement led him to devise many improvements in
census taking and data gathering. In a pamphlet on crime
issued in 1831, he intuited what we know today as the law of
large numbers and also intuited the effects of increasing sample
sizes on what we now call the standard error of the estimate.
Like others, Quetelets scientic work was motivated by
a reformist vision. He was interested in crime because he
wanted to end it; in mortality because he wanted to delay it; in
education because he wanted to maximize it. To the extent that
these scholars had an academic agenda, it was to demonstrate
that a true science of society was indeed possible and to show
what such a science would look like.
Also worthy of mention in this context are the various
statistical societies in Britain and on the Continent that came
into being in the mid-to-late nineteenth century (see Elesh,
1972) the Manchester Statistical Society (1833), the Royal
Statistical Society (1834) (founded, incidentally, by Quetelet),
the International Statistics Congress (1853), and even the
American Statistical Association (1839). As David Elesh notes,
all of these societies were sponsoring or in many cases doing
themselves applied social research work that today we easily
recognize as precursors to empirical social science.
Finally, there is Charles Booth (18401916) who, like
Galton, goes unmentioned in Nisbets history. And yet many
people trace the origins of modern survey research to Charles
Booth, who produced a landmark study titled Life and Labor of
the People of London, published in 17 volumes (!) over the

period 18891903 (Groves et al., 2009: 4). If we accept the
conventional idea that Booths London surveys were the rst
true sample surveys of the modern form, then we must again
acknowledge the primary role of applied issues in the
conception and maturation of the discipline. John Madges
(1962: 536) comments on Booths work and on the social
survey movement that Booth initiated are insightful and worth
quoting. The social survey movement, he says, . was
generally concerned with the type of sociography needed to
establish the incidence of social evils, primarily with poverty,
with the purpose of arousing public opinion into taking prac-
tical measures to deal with such evils. One cannot disagree with
the verdict . that the social survey is not concerned with
evolving any comprehensive sociological theory.
American sociology was also rooted in applied concerns.
The focus of the early Chicago School on applied, practical
problems was quoted earlier in this article. Many people
consider the Chicago School to be the original foundation of
American sociology, but this overlooks the important socio-
logical work on race undertaken in the Atlanta Sociological
Laboratory under the direction of W.E.B. DuBois at the end of
the nineteenth century. DuBoiss The Philadelphia Negro,
although routinely ignored for generations, was not only the
rst social scientic study of recently freed African-Americans, it
was the rst seriously scientic sociological study ever done in
the United States (see Wright, 2012, for details).
Psychology
Psychology provides another example of how the reality of
discipline development is different from textbook caricatures.
In most accounts, the rst recognizably modern psychologist
was the German Wilhelm Wundt (18321920). Wundt was
a professor, a scholar, when he rst proposed that psychology
should be seen as an independent discipline, separate from and
not reducible to biology, physiology, or philosophy (Jansz,
2004). His version of psychology focused on consciousness,
that is, on a persons subjective experiences of self, others,
mind, and the world at large. He is notable within psychology
for having founded the rst experimental psychology labora-
tory, in Leipzig in 1879.
It is of some signicance that the rst line of research taken
up in Wundts laboratory concerned human reaction times,
and was animated by very practical, applied concerns. The story
goes that Wundt was inspired to study this topic when
astronomers were having trouble in accurately measuring the
passing of a star through the crosshairs of a telescope. The
measured time was different for each observer, which was
attributed to the incompetence of the assistants doing the
measurements. Wundts insight was that the variable was not
incompetence but reaction times that differed for every
observer. The reaction time studies conducted during the rst
few years of Wundts laboratory constitute the rst historical
example of a coherent research program, explicitly directed
toward psychological issues and involving a number of inter-
locking studies (Danziger, 1980a: 106).
Wundt maintained that experimental psychology could
only measure sensory input and motor output and that the
most interesting inner workings of the mind would remain the
Applied Social Research, History of 853
province of the armchair philosophers (Bolles, 1993).
Although his achievements were cited often by his contempo-
raries, few of his theoretical concepts or empirical results
survived his lifetime (Jansz, 2004: 32). As Kurt Danziger
concludes, Wundts crucial contribution seems to fall in the
area of methodology rather than in the area of substantive
theoretical concepts or specic empirical discoveries (1980b:
109). Aside from the original reaction time studies, Wundts
psychology could not be said to have been animated by strong
practical concerns. His mixture of physiology, psychology, lab
procedure, and philosophy of science would seem to mark him
as a classical academic psychologist. Yet one of Wundts
earliest students was the Philadelphia-born Lightner Witmer,
who earned his PhD in psychology under Wundt in 1893.
Witmer was one of the rst to recognize the need for a eld
that applied psychology to real life, as opposed to it remaining
purely experimental (Pernaski et al., 2013). He is also credited
with establishing the rst psychology clinic in the United States
and is often cited as the founder of clinical psychology.
Witmers clinic was not based on any particular theory of
mind or school of thought in psychology; his practical
psychology was based more or less exclusively on investi-
gating the mental development of schoolchildren using statis-
tical and clinical methods (Fancher and Rutherford, 2012). A
key clinical innovation was his training school for the treat-
ment of children suffering from retardation or physical defects
that interfered with school progress (Fancher and Rutherford,
2012). In one famous case, Witmer observed that a child
having academic difculties could not see well and thus
procured for this student a proper pair of glasses, whereupon
the students academic progress improved. There was no
Jamesian epistemology, no theory of consciousness, involved
in this practical psychology. The boy could not see!
In addition to Wilhelm Wundt and his students, Sigmund
Freud (18561939) is often cited as a founding father of
academic psychology. Like Wundt, Freuds background was in
biological science (neurology) and early in his career as
a physician, he conducted research on cerebral palsy, aphasia,
and neuroanatomy. But Freuds interests rapidly transcended
biological connes. It is well known that his interests in
psychotherapy originated in his interactions with Josef Breuer
(18421925) and Breuers treatment of one Anna O (real
name: Bertha Pappenheim). Anna O suffered various psycho-
somatic symptoms whose origins were diagnosed as hyster-
ical, the treatment for which was making her recall past events.
Whether the reported remission of symptoms was real and
whether the remission was due to the recalling intervention
remain matters of contention. What is not disputed is that
Freud saw in this experience a method to treat a wide variety of
psychiatric disorders, an insight from which psychoanalysis
was born, and that his animating interest was in developing
methods to treat mental disease (not to develop grand theories
of the Unconscious, as many commentators would have it).
To the early American psychologists, the application of
psychology to a wide variety of pressing social problems and
issues was As American as Apple Pie (Goodwin, 2012). The
range of applications of early American psychology was far
reaching and sought to further the discipline while simulta-
neously serving humanity. Applications included mental
testing, the use of psychology in business and industry, and the
854 Applied Social Research, History of
use of psychology to address personal psychological problems
(what eventually became clinical psychology).
Mental testing began as a way of identifying students who
were behind and aiding them in achieving better academic
performance. The method, of course, was the modern intelli-
gence quotient test developed by Alfred Binet (18571911)
and his colleague Theodore Simon (Goodwin, 2012). Binet
and Simon believed that if one could identify low performing,
academically disabled students reliably, these students could
be sent away to receive the attention they needed to catch up
(in this case to the Vineland Training Institute in New Jersey,
a group home for feebleminded children) (Goodwin, 2012).
Lewis Terman expanded on the BinetSimon test in 1916 with
the Stanford-Binet intelligence test which, after many revisions,
is still used today. Robert Yerkes (18761956) expanded on
Termans work by developing the rst group tests given to army
soldiers to determine whether soldiers were in the right posi-
tions or which soldiers might make good ofcers. Later in the
1920s, Yerkes and Terman united to create the rst group tests
in schools, the Scholastic Aptitude Test, which, also after many
revisions, is still in use today.
A large group of psychologists who had been initially
trained as experimentalists saw that their expertise had poten-
tial practical (and protable) application when utilized to solve
recurring problems in the private sector. Hugo Munsterberg
(18631916) was the rst to explore what is today called
forensic psychology and later what is now known as industrial
and organizational psychology (both with their own sections
in this Encyclopedia). Munsterberg saw the critical importance
of psychology in selecting juries (Munsterberg, 1908) as well as
the benets of understanding how psychology could affect
consumer patterns (Munsterberg, 1913). Walter Dill Scott
(18691955) also investigated the role of psychology in
industry and business. He was commissioned by an advertising
agency to research the psychology of advertising; today,
psychological research is an integral and signicant part of the
advertising and marketing industry (Scott, 1903).
In the United States, clinical psychology began as a means
to treat students with academic problems. Lightner Witmer, as
discussed earlier, set up a section of his lab for the treatment of
these children and created the term clinical psychology (this
eld too has its own section in this Encyclopedia). A key
impetus to the growth of clinical psychology was the aftermath
of World War II, when nearly 60% of returning veterans
appeared to suffer from some type of mental illness. Since then,
the application of psychology to solve practical problems has
continued to grow within the discipline (Jansz, 2004). A shift
from a primarily academic and laboratory-based endeavor to
a social enterprise, accepting of its unavoidable existence
within the practical context of modern society, has meant
psychology is increasingly paying tribute to its roots in applied
social science.
Economics
As with all the other social sciences, strands of economic
thinking go back to the ancient Greeks; important precursors
from the Enlightenment era include the utilitarians and the
social contract thinkers (Bentham, Locke, Hume). But most
economic historians trace the origin of the modern discipline
to Adam Smith and his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the
Wealth of Nations (usually rendered as The Wealth of Nations).
The question Smith raised was what accounted for the
obvious (even then) variation in national wealth. Some
nations, that is, were obviously very wealthy; others were not.
How could these differences be explained? The mercantilists
argued that the basis of national wealth inhered in the accu-
mulation of precious metals (mainly silver and gold); Smith
eventually argued himself to the position that the true
difference lay in the productivity of labor, but that became
practically a footnote in the work as a whole. What Smith
produced in the process of puzzling over this question was
nothing less than a paradigm for the understanding of the
political economy of capitalism. This, surely, is the founda-
tional basis for all of modern economics.
Todays economists are criticized by some as maintaining
relatively little interest in the history of their discipline outside
obligatory courses in the history of economic thought. In
economics, history is but a time series embedded within a set
of data (Kates, 2013: 17), not events and ideas to go back to,
analyze, and learn from. Students of economics are shown the
classical theories then told not to go there (Kates, 2013: 2).
So, as with many of the social and behavioral sciences, the true
origins of the discipline of economics have given way to texts
and articles no more than 20 years old that contain, at best,
a caricature of the disciplines foundation and development
(Kates, 2013: 1).
Contemporary economists often study the economic
implications of various policy changes in order to frame and
concretize policy decisions. This directly implies that a crucial
charge of economics today is to solve real-world problems
(Kates, 2013). Take, for example, the economic controversies
surrounding proposed increases in the minimum wage,
changes in immigration policy, educational policy, or welfare
policies of all sorts indeed, about nearly any policy being
considered at the national level anywhere in the world. This is
reminiscent of David Colanders (1992) lament that applied
economics is what most economists do (p. 197).
The phrase applied economics was rst used by the British
economist John Neville Keynes, father of John Maynard
Keynes, arguably the most inuential economist of the
twentieth century. Keynes drew a distinction between the
science of economics, by which he meant formal economic
theory that could be developed deductively, by reasoning
from rst principles without the pesky interference of
economic facts; and the art of economics, using the scientic
laws and principles of the discipline to solve practical, applied
problems. The art of economics was labeled applied
economics (Colander, 1992).
Today, most of economics inside the academy and all of
economics outside of it is applied economics in Keynes
sense. Many university departments of economics will have
economic theorists on the faculty and most of the Nobel Prizes
in economics are for theoretical breakthroughs. But most
economists are economists of something: labor force econo-
mists, demographic economists, agricultural economists,
environmental economists, education economists, and on
through a long list that is more or less isomorphic with the
undergraduate economics curriculum in most universities.

A key tension in modern economics is between the elegance
of formal economic theory and the grubbiness of modern
economic realities. As David Byrne (2011) explains, many
foundational economic principles have failed to predict or
explain much of anything in the real world, due largely to
unrealistic assumptions required to maintain ceteris paribus
conditions within models, which can never be the case in
reality (Byrne, 2011: 182). Formal theory demands these
assumptions; the real world regularly defeats them. A key
element in the economic controversy over increasing the
minimum wage was simply whether neoclassical price theory
could be successfully applied to wages and employment. This
was much more important to the economists than to the
economy (Leonard, 2000).
Political Science
Founders of political science are often said to include Thomas
Hobbes, John Locke, and Niccolo Machiavelli, among others.
Later Herbert Baxter Adams (18501901), John Burgess
(18441931), William Dunning (18571922), and Albert
Bushnell Hart (18541943) established the discipline in the
United States during the late-nineteenth century and early
twentieth centuries. Adams founded the Johns Hopkins
Studies in Historical and Political Science in 1883, one of the
rst journals devoted specically to political science. Burgess
found Political Science Quarterly at Columbia in 1886. And
Dunning and Bushnell both contributed greatly to the Recon-
structionist literature after the American Civil War.
Despite the European precursors (Hobbes, Machiavelli),
political science is often said to be an American invention. It
was the Progressive Era in the United States (1890s1920s) and
the concerns of that era gave rise to a discipline dedicated to the
application of its knowledge, concepts, and techniques to
address current political and societal issues. Raymond
Seidelman and Edward Harpham (1985) propose that the
persons most directly involved in taking the discipline in an
applied direction included Woodrow Wilson (18561924),
Charles A. Beard (18741948), Charles Merriam (18741953),
and Harold Lasswell (190278). In Seidelman and Harphams
(1985) account, Wilson is rendered as the grandfather of the
discipline and Beard, Merriam, and Lasswell as forgotten uncles.
Even Woodrow Wilsons work as a political scientist prior to
his Presidential win in 1912 included advocating for the
application of the science to aid the government in knowing
what they could do better and how they could work more
efciently. Wilson began his piece The Study of Public
Administration (1887) by pointing out (in the rst sentence)
that the only sciences that get studied are those sciences that are
necessary in a society (i.e., sciences with some application). And
in the rst sentence of his other major work, Constitutional
Government in the United States (1908), Wilson pointed out that
his goal throughout the piece was to explore the US Consti-
tutional system with an eye to practice, not to theory (p. 1).
Charles E. Merriam was a builder of the modern discipline of
political science and his inuence can be seen in essentially
every facet of political science as it is practiced today. He is best
known academically as the founder of value-free behavioralism,
which aimed to understand, free of ideological lenses, the
Applied Social Research, History of 855
psychological and social factors that shaped mass political
behavior. His more pronounced inuence on students and
professionals of political science came from his ability to
persuade a generation of political scientists of the importance of
understanding the reasons behind specic political behaviors
and how the understanding of those underlying reasons could
be the bridge between academic political science and the
workings of the federal government. This was the behavioralism
revolution that lives on today within the discipline.
Merriam, along with many others, sensed a crisis within
Americas democracy at the beginning of the twentieth century
and dedicated much of his science to nding a solution. He was
obsessed by the possibly deleterious effects of rapid techno-
logical change on politics and society and wanted to ensure that
scientic knowledge was being produced in a way that could be
useful to the masses as well as the federal government. Along
with many others, he was fascinated by the apparent contra-
diction between Americans zealous embrace of ingenuity,
innovation, all that was modern, versus an often parochial,
even antique political culture. His solution, rendered in modern
terms, was to integrate science, including social science, in the
political culture and in the political process. Science, he felt,
would need to become a non-revolutionary extension of
democratic culture in America (Barrow, 2000: 114).
It was not until Roosevelts presidency began in 1933 that
Merriam saw the uniting of academic political science study
and its application. The onset of the Great Depression meant
Washington was more interested in the advice of social scien-
tists than ever before. As Seidelman and Harpham describe,
applied political science was vindicated (Barrow, 2000: 126),
as academics secured a place at the public policy table. Roo-
sevelt mirrored Merriams afnity for practicality and for an
experimental approach to democracy.
Charles A. Beard is considered more of an historian than
a political scientist by present-day scholars, but he played
a major role in the development of the discipline (Barrow,
2000). Beards work was popular among intellectuals and
laymen alike. He felt that one of the most important questions
to be asked of the modern (late-nineteenth century) political
system was who would conduct the industrial and economic
planning for the country. He founded the Rand School of
Social Science in 1906 in order to train ofcials, party orga-
nizers, labor journalists, and others in socialist theory and
applied social science in order to give them the academic edge
he thought they needed to be successful.
Other Disciplines
Both space and expertise limit the attention we are able to give
to the applied origins of the other social sciences: of geography,
anthropology, and the like, not to mention all the subdisci-
plines: gerontology, criminology, demography, and all the rest.
Anthropology, as all the social sciences, can trace its roots to the
ancients, but modern anthropology greatly expanded as a direct
result of European colonialism, the contact of the colonizing
powers with indigenous populations, and the obvious admin-
istrative needs of the colonial and imperial powers to under-
stand these indigenous populations, their languages, customs,
institutions, and cultures. Anthropology and related sciences
856 Applied Social Research, History of
sprang into existence to satisfy these managerial needs to study
scientically the cultures of colonized people a source of some
embarrassment to modern-day anthropology.
Geography is arguably the oldest of the social sciences, since
the need to understand and record where things are is prehis-
toric. But the evolution of geography into a recognized academic
discipline took place, again, in the post-Enlightenment era,
during the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Alexander
von Humboldt is usually considered the father of geography as
an academic and scientic discipline. Humbodlts famous
survey of the geography of Latin America (1817) laid the
foundation for the science of physical geography and to some
extent meteorology also. He was among the rst to realize that
latitude provided a means to compare climatic conditions in
different countries and to measure the decline in temperature
with altitude, and he intuited the geophysical causes of tropical
storms. He is also the progenitor of the idea, now common in
geographical circles, that the proper domain of geography is at
the intersection of geology, biology, and meteorology, that these
intersections determined where plants grew and thus where
animals would concentrate; from this, the spatial ecology of the
human species could be properly inferred.
Today, the geographers have expanded their rightful
domain to include the spatial aspect of all social activity and
structure; thus, there is a geography of knowledge, crime,
disability, even nance and children, among many, many
others, all with corresponding entries elsewhere in this Ency-
clopedia. The situation in geography is thus reminiscent of that
in modern economics: a few core techniques and basic prin-
ciples as the science of geography and an enormous range of
applied work that denes the disciplines art. Groves, Robert M., Fowler Jr., Floyd J., Couper, Mick P., Lepkowski, James M.,
Conclusion
The history of applied social science is indeed the history of
the social sciences themselves. There can be no ner a conclu-
sion to this article than a passage from an article by the soci-
ologist Alvin W. Gouldner (192080) on Explorations in
Applied Social Science (1989[1956]: 27)
There seems to be no close correlation, therefore, between the
development of generalizations by the pure disciplines and the
multiplication of opportunities for, and varieties of, applied soci-
ology. The applied sciences cannot be fruitfully regarded as springing
Athena-like from the furrowed brow of the pure disciplines. Any
metaphor which conceives of applied social science as the offspring,
and of the basic disciplines as parents, is misleading. It obscures the
point that the applied sciences often contribute as much to pure
science as they receive from it.
See also: Anthropology, History of; Clinical Psychology in
Europe, History of; Criminology, History of; Demography, Early
History of; Enlightenment: Impact on the Social Sciences;
Enlightenment; Macroeconomics, History of up to 1933;
Political Economy, History of; Political Science, History of;
Psychology, History of (Twentieth Century); Psychotherapy,
History of: Psychiatric Aspects; Social Ecology: The Chicago
School; Social Scientists as Experts and Public Intellectuals;
Sociology, History of.
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