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RONALD W. PERRYDISASTER RESEARCH
SOCIOHISTORY OF THE FIELDDescriptions of calamities exist as far back as the
earliest human writings, but systematic empirical
studies and theoretical treatises on social features
of disasters appeared only in the twentieth centu-
ry. The first major publications in both instances
were produced by sociologists. Samuel Prince
(1920) wrote a doctoral dissertation in sociology at
Columbia University that examined the social
change consequences of a munitions ship explo-
sion in the harbor of Halifax, Canada. Pitirim
Sorokin (1942) two decades later wrote Man and
Society in Calamity that mostly speculated on how
war, revolution, famine, and pestilence might af-
fect the mental processes and behaviors, as well as
the social organizations and the cultural aspects of
impacted populations. However, there was no build-
ing on these pioneering efforts.
It was not until the early 1950s that disaster
studies started to show any continuity and the
accumulation of a knowledge base. Military inter-
est in possible American civilian reactions to post-
World War II threats from nuclear and biological
warfare led to support of academic research on
peacetime disasters. The National Opinion Re-
search Center (NORC) undertook the key project
at the University of Chicago between 1950 and- This work, intended to be multidisciplinary,
became dominated by sociologists as were other
concurrent studies at the University of Oklahoma,
Michigan State, and the University of Texas
(Quarantelli 1987, 1994). The NORC study not
only promoted field research as the major way for
gathering data, but also brought sociological ideas
from the literature on collective behavior and
notions of organizational structure and functions
into the thinking of disaster researchers (Dynes
1988; Dynes and Tierney 1994).
While the military interest quickly waned, re-
search in the area obtained a strategic point of
salience and support when the U.S. National Acade-
my of Sciences in the late 1950s created the Disas-
ter Research Group (DRG). Operationally run by
sociologists using the NORC work as a prototype,
the DRG supported field research of others as well
as conducted its own studies (Fritz 1961). When
the DRG was phased out in 1963, the Disaster
Research Center (DRC) was established at the
Ohio State University. DRC helped the field of
study to become institutionalized by its continu-
ous existence to the present day (having moved to
the University of Delaware in 1985). In its thirty-six
years of existence DRC has trained dozens of
graduate students, built the largest specialized
library in the world on social aspects of disasters,
produced over six hundred publications and about
three dozen Ph. D. dissertations (see http://
http://www.udel.edu/DRC/homepage.htm),,) continual-
ly and consciously applied a sociological perspec-
tive to new disaster research topics, initiated an