overview of the Historical and Contextual development ● 15as humanitarian but as scientific, concerned with making discoveries about
human social behavior (Shaw 2009).
Building on and further defining these emerging differences, which
appear to have been articulated on both sides, a separate social work program
was established at the university in 1920, as the School of Social Service
Administration. This was essentially a school of social work. The female stu-
dents and staff of the sociology department left the department; most joined
the new school to pursue social work education, although some moved into
other departments at the university, including anthropology and psychology
(Shaw 2009).
The women of Hull House did not stop theorizing, and they continued
to clarify their social scientific thinking. Jane Addams clearly expressed her
views on appropriate social scientific methodology as needing to be engaged
rather than detached, perspectival rather than indifferent to context, and
value-laden rather than value-free. She believed that lived experience and
scientific methodology interwove and complemented one another and that
data gathering, hypothesis testing, and theoretical developments were better
focused and more realistic when aimed at achieving social benefits. Addams’s
pragmatist theory of ethics held that ethical theory needed to be tried in
action. Real-life application was needed to challenge, stretch, and develop
ethical understandings and conceptualizations. Addams also believed that
experiencing the lives of immigrants and other impoverished people living in
substandard inner-city dwellings would enable people to empathize. Empathy
was the key mechanism by which practical experiences that might otherwise
merely provide insight were transformed into moral imperatives to act against
injustice (Seigfried 2013).
In 1924, Edith Abbott, one of the Hull House women, became the
dean of the School of Social Service Administration, and in 1927, she and
Sophinisba Breckinridge founded the Journal of Social Service Review. Similarly
to Addams, Abbott and Breckinridge held clear views about the relationships
of research, theory, practice, and ethics: that research should be undertaken
not merely to gather knowledge but to solve welfare problems, that research
should be sound and scientific, that science and caring are not contradictory
or incompatible, and that practitioners should be skilled in research so that
practice is informed by knowledge (Shaw 2008).
Initially, some academic sociologists at the University of Chicago continued
to actively work with social work educators and practitioners in various ways.
They worked in similar departments and shared research interests. Sociologists,
although now more commonly personally abstaining from practice, continued
to send their students out to pursue charity-related fieldwork (Lengermann
and Niebrugge 2007). Over time, however, the professionalization goals of