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In 1949 the Russel Sage Foundation and the Jewish Board of Guardians began a joint project in which selected social science concepts and thinking were applied to child guidance practice. The first phase of this work appeared in 1952, and it was felt that the social sciences provided an approach which would extend the diagnostic and therapeutic goals in the child guidance clinic. The present volume is a follow-up study based on the testing of these concepts by a therapeutic team.
Four concepts were selected from the social sciences and incorporated in the child guidance practice. These concepts are family orientation, social interaction, social role and culture conflict. The concept of family orientation designates “the sum total of persons who form continuous members of the household and exert an influence upon the development of the child.” Another key concept, social interaction, is defined as follows: “The behavior of one group member is simultaneously cause and effect of the behavior of the other members.” The concept of culture conflict is related to those conflicts between therapist and patient, or therapist and patient's family which would create problems in diagnosis and therapy. Since all therapeutic techniques include some social repercussions which occur during or after treatment, “it was proposed to introduce the concept of social roles into the theory underlying therapeutic planning.
Four cases are presented in detail to show the systematic employment of these four nuclear social science concepts in diagnostic and therapeutic operations. For the first time a consulting sociologist was a member of a team in a child guidance unit. This team consisted of a clinical director as the psychiatrist, the director of casework services, a senior