Hull-House Women and the Sympathize, Investigate, Educate, Legislate, Enforce Approach to Social Work Research

In the last decade, Dr. Cathy Moran of the Jane Addams Papers Project and other archivists have significantly advanced the project of collecting and digitalizing letters, papers, speeches, photographs, and other records of the extraordinary accomplishments of Jane Addams and other Hull-House (H-H) residents. Responding to cluster area 13 (history), I will report on my archival research summarizing the major injustice-profiling and justice-promoting research studies led by Addams, Florence Kelley, Alice Hamilton, and colleagues. I argue that their feminist pragmatist conception of science has unrecognized value for social work researchers, and I will identify lessons.

Between 1892 and 1933, H-H residents conducted more than 20 research studies. My purposive sampling of their investigations focuses on those with detailed information on goals, method, findings, and application. These include Kelley’s sweatshop labor study (1892), the garbage and neighborhood sanitation study (1894), the book length Hull House Maps and Papers study (1985), The Philadelphia Negro (1899) study conducted by W. E. B. Du Bois with guidance from Hull-House, the 1902 study of housing conditions in three Chicago districts, Hamilton’s Typhoid epidemic study (1902), and the Newsboy Conditions study (1903). I will report on my use of a qualitative latent coding strategy to compare the seven studies.

I will add the step of “sympathize” to Florence Kelley’s summary of the H-H research approach of “investigate, educate, legislate, and enforce” and make the case that this sequence characterizes the commonalities in these studies. Salient examples from the scientific reports and quotations from the autobiographies of Addams, Kelley, and Hamilton will illustrate each phase. Attention will be given to ways that research was used to educate citizens and to bring about real-world changes: new legislation at the state and national levels, better enforcement of ordinances, program development, the creation of enforcement organizations like the National Consumer League, and the movement of H-H women into policy making and government roles made possible by the investigations. Study photos will be shared.

More than 100 years ago, I will show, Jane Addams who identified as a social worker and these other Hull-House women (and male associates) pioneered scientific inquiry anticipating contemporary methods including social epidemiology, geographic information systems mapping, PhotoVoice for justice, ethnography, life history interviewing, participatory action research, and the use of infographics. More importantly, they developed a way of thinking about the generation of scientific knowledge that avoids wasteful (defined as not making a difference in the reduction of avoidable suffering by vulnerable populations) social work research. Their ameliorative and transformative projects were generally impactful, I conclude, because of the shaping of Hull-House as a knowledge production center; the immersion of researchers in the local community; the crafting of relationships that cultivated reciprocity, sympathy, and understanding between residents and neighbors from diverse backgrounds; their forging of partnerships between neighbors and advocacy organizations in communities of inquiry; their commitment to avoiding knowledge-action dualisms and putting findings to experimental tests; and their creative openness to mixed methods.