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This book is a sociological study of a professional, middle-class suburb of a city in Canada. The name Crestwood Heights is a thin disguise for the suburb of a provincial capital. The book differs from other sociological studies of communities belonging to the Western civilization by being part of a project launched by the National Council for Mental Hygiene (Canada). The project owes its origin to a determined attempt to study the causation of high post-war psychiatric morbidity and to initiate a research programme of preventive treatment. It thus has a very strong therapeutic orientation. A community with a high level of education and materially well-off was chosen as a subject for the study because it was considered that adverse environmental conditions would be a variable best eliminated from the study, and also because such a community was of national importance as it was one from which would come a disproportionate number of leaders of opinion and others responsible for the fate of intelligence in the next generation. Crestwood Heights had also built up a very progressive and efficient educational department which was interested in Mental Health problems. The original project was primarily directed at the study of children in their educational setting, but it was soon realized that the findings would only be significant if concerned with the sociological aspect of the community life in which the whole of the project took place.
The major part of the volume presents the material of the survey and is followed by a further part in which that material is analysed and assessed. The very detailed data are presented in chapters which, starting with the geographical and historical description, go on to examine the suburb as a stage for a circumscribed and individual sub-culture,