community study

community study

the empirical (usually ethnographic) study of the social relations and social structure within a clearly defined locality Significant American examples of such studies include Lloyd Warner's Yankee City studies; while British examples include Dennis et al., Coal is Our Life (1956), a study of a Yorkshire mining community, and Margaret Stacey's Tradition and Change: a study ofBanbury (1960), in which the focus was on a changing community, seen by the researchers as the meeting point of two cultures: the traditional local culture and that introduced by newcomers. In POLITICAL SCIENCE in America, these studies have been used to provide a unit of manageable size within which to test propositions about the distribution of POWER (see also COMMUNITY POWER).

Collins Dictionary of Sociology, 3rd ed. © HarperCollins Publishers 2000