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Collaborative experiments: Jane Addams, Hull House and experimental social work

Matthias Gross

Department of Urban and Environmental Sociology, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, UFZ, Permoserstr. 15, 04318 Leipzig, Germany, matthias.gross{at}ufz.de

The social reformer, sociologist and feminist Jane Addams (1860—1935), who established Chicago's Hull House as one of the first settlement houses in America, described her work as experimental, but at the same time she and many of her co-workers rejected the idea of Hull House as a laboratory for social scientific investigation. The present article discusses Addams's unique understanding of social experiment beyond the laboratory. Through `experimental' improvement of social conditions for underserved people and communities in the city of Chicago, Addams and her co-workers perceived the laboratory experiment as an inferior variation of the experiment in society, and not vice versa. Based on the description of experiments at Hull House, this essay attempts to show how different dimensions of experimentation beyond the laboratory can be framed and how alternate phases that combine knowledge production and knowledge application can be conceptually comprised.

Key Words: Experiments in social science • History of sociology • Social settlements • Society as laboratory

Social Science Information, Vol. 48, No. 1, 81-95 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/0539018408099638
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