{"id":31081,"date":"2019-07-16T14:17:27","date_gmt":"2019-07-16T18:17:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/college.unc.edu\/?p=31081"},"modified":"2024-07-02T17:12:02","modified_gmt":"2024-07-02T17:12:02","slug":"father-for-social-science","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/collegearchive.unc.edu\/?p=31081","title":{"rendered":"A Father for Social Science"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Odum Institute, the first social science research center in the world, has trained and supported hundreds of researchers specializing in everything from anthropology to city and regional planning to public health for the past 95 years. And it all exists thanks to the determination of one eccentric man.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Howard
Howard Odum sits in his “famous” office in the UNC Alumni Building. Much like his home office, it was covered in books and papers that he didn’t allow anyone to reorganize. (photo courtesy of University Archives)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cHe loved the South \u2014 lived it, breathed it, and wanted it to be all it could be. He was fascinated with human beings, and I think that\u2019s what drew him to the social sciences.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2013Kathy Hill, granddaughter of social science innovator Howard Odum<\/em><\/p>\n

Restless, indefatigable, a spirit of challenge. These are how people describe Howard Odum. At six-foot-two, he was big in stature but more so in character. He worked 18 to 20 hours a day and at home could often be found sitting amidst piles of books and papers in his office, deep in thought or writing.<\/p>\n

He didn\u2019t care for small talk or parties and, in general, found social life trivial. He would kick off a meeting only to sneak out to go write in his office, returning about an hour later to wrap things up. But what he lacked in interest in routine matters he made up for in enthusiasm. He was always moving, his thoughts pouring from his lips like a late-afternoon deluge \u2014 so much so that students had trouble keeping up with his lectures. He even signed his letters, \u201cHurriedly yours.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHis eyes were on fire,\u201d Kathy Hill, his granddaughter, remembers of him. \u201cHe was this burning fuel who had his wing of the house and everyone gave him berth.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Odum
Odum with one of his bulls. (photo courtesy of University Archives)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Like moths, his flame drew the attention of his colleagues as well. \u201cHe was like a human dynamo,\u201d Guy and Guion Johnson<\/a>, the husband-and-wife team that became Odum\u2019s first research assistants, once wrote. \u201cAlways active, constantly generating new ideas.\u201d<\/p>\n

Odum arrived at UNC in 1920 with \u201ca head full of dreams.\u201d By the time he was 36, he had already earned PhDs in psychology and sociology, and published his first book. In his first two years at UNC, he founded the School of Social Work<\/a> (then called the School of Public Welfare), organized the Department of Sociology<\/a>, and started the Journal of Social Forces <\/em>\u2014 all the while raising pedigreed Jersey cattle.<\/p>\n

Perhaps most importantly, he founded the Institute for Research in Social Science (IRSS) in 1924. Today, it\u2019s better known as the Odum Institute for Research in Social Science<\/a>, the oldest university-based interdisciplinary social science research institute in the world.<\/p>\n

What began as home base for UNC researchers focused on the social and economic problems of the South has evolved into a center that fosters interdisciplinary research and offers training, consulting, and other support services to faculty across campus.<\/p>\n

But how did it become this? The answer, for both Odum the man and the institute, is people.<\/p>\n

Ahead of his time<\/h3>\n

Guy Johnson<\/a> knew Odum on paper before meeting him in person, their relationship a product of handwritten letters and Johnson\u2019s first submission to the Journal of Social Forces <\/em>\u2014 a piece on the Ku Klux Klan. Johnson, a sociologist, agreed to come to UNC in 1924, but only if his wife Guion could get a position, too. At the time, she was heading the journalism department at the Baylor College of Women. Odum offered them both $1,500 and a research assistantship.<\/p>\n

Guion was the first female research assistant ever hired at the university. Within a year of her arrival, Odum also brought in Harriet Herring, who spent the next 40 years researching the social ills connected with the industrialization of the South. He also hired Katharine Jocher, who began as the institute\u2019s executive secretary, but was ultimately named assistant director in 1927 and stayed in that role for 30 years.<\/p>\n

\u201c[Odum] was a pioneer in bringing women into what was pretty much an all-male institution when he got here in the \u201920s,\u201d says John Shelton Reed<\/a>, director of the institute from 1988 to 2000. \u201cThose three women were among the first, if not the<\/em> first, to be taken seriously at UNC. [\u2026] Some people were not happy about it, but Odum didn\u2019t care. He plowed ahead on that front.\u201d<\/p>\n

Studies of the South<\/h3>\n

In the early days of the institute, researchers invested most of their time into the social and economic problems of the South. The studies remained broad and included surveys of race, folk culture, government, agriculture, public welfare, and industry.<\/p>\n

\""This
“This was a famous scene,” writes Katharine Jocher on the back of this photo. Odum leads his Regionalism Lab on the top floor of the Alumni Building in the 1930s.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cOdum had an intense devotion to the South and an abiding faith in its people,\u201d wrote the Johnsons in \u201cResearch in Service to Society,\u201d their book on the institute\u2019s first 50 years. \u201cWhat the South needed, he thought, was not harsh criticism but understanding, wise leadership, and self-development.\u201d Odum wanted to show the nation why the South was different from other parts of the country, and why it was \u201cat the bottom of the economic ladder.\u201d<\/p>\n

An impressive breadth of subjects permeated Odum\u2019s own projects, from a fictional trilogy on the life of an African American man in the Jim Crow south to a two-volume national study of social trends. Race relations were particularly important to him.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe was interested in race relations, but he was very cautious about it,\u201d explains Reed, who points to the difficulties of being a progressive southerner during the Jim Crow era. \u201cHe knew perfectly well he could endanger everything he had built by taking too advanced a stand on race relations.\u201d So he empowered researchers who could be more bold \u2014 people like Raper, who studied lynching and how to prevent it, and Johnson, who co-founded the Commission on Interracial Cooperation.<\/p>\n

In 1931, Johnson invited Langston Hughes, a notable African American poet and social activist, to give a presentation at Memorial Hall. \u201c[Johnson] wrote extensively on race relations and was constantly in and out of hot water in a way that Odum didn\u2019t want to be,\u201d Reed says. But Odum \u201cunderstood that segregation was holding the South back,\u201d Reed adds, and that it needed to be addressed sooner rather than later.<\/p>\n

The institute produced numerous studies on African American life that intersected with religion, socioeconomics, and tenant farming. Odum felt that agricultural problems in particular plagued this part of the U.S. In 1926, he added graduate student Rupert Vance to his team. For his doctoral dissertation, Vance analyzed the struggles of the cotton industry \u2014 research that eventually became a book.<\/p>\n

Raper\u2019s research also extended into agriculture. To better understand tenant farming, he not only interviewed 300 tenant families, but moved in next door. He would dine with them, hunt and fish with them, and attend church with them. Over the next two decades, the institute would produce nine books, 25 articles and chapters, and 21 manuscripts on Southern agricultural problems.<\/p>\n

Herring, on the other hand, investigated industrialization. Before coming to UNC in 1925, she worked as a personnel director for Pomona Mills in Greensboro, instituting the first comprehensive employee welfare system for cotton mill workers in the South. At the institute, she studied the facets of life in mill villages such as schooling, church services, recreation, public health and housing \u2014 the information from which she compiled in a book called, \u201cWelfare Work in Mill Villages: The Story of Extra-Mill Activities in North Carolina.\u201d<\/p>\n

These are just a few of the many accomplishments of the institute. By the time Odum stepped down as director in 1944, IRSS researchers had published more than 80 books and 300 articles across more than 40 fields.<\/p>\n

\"Workers
Workers in a DuPont Company plant thread a slitting machine, which cuts the wide cellophane sheet (seen on the right) into narrower strips for wrapping bread and other articles. (photo courtesy of University Archives)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

New roles, new goals<\/h3>\n

For the next 14 years, sociologist Gordon Blackwell would continue Odum\u2019s legacy and help the institute grow and change with the field of social science. He proposed a program to train personnel on how to interpret research results for a general audience to help shape policy \u2014 a move that would encourage IRSS to evolve into the training resource it\u2019s become today.<\/p>\n

Blackwell also created a multidisciplinary team to could conduct research on human behavior. In the 1950s, he invited public health researcher Cecil Sheps and social psychologist John Thibaut to join his staff. Many psychologists who joined the UNC faculty after Thibaut, an expert in the psychology of small groups, would become affiliated with the institute.<\/p>\n

Instead of having one specialist per research area, as was Odum\u2019s practice, Blackwell believed in having a series of interdisciplinary projects within an overarching focal area. Those themes included political behavior, urban studies, organization, and the social science of health and health professions. By the 1960s, most of these spun off into independent programs.<\/p>\n

The institute can be credited for creating the UNC Center for Urban and Regional Studies, while Odum, the man, helped develop the Department of City and Regional Planning. Sheps, who led multiple public health research projects at IRSS, became the founding director of the Health Services Research Center, known today as the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research<\/a>.<\/p>\n

By the 1960s, institute goals began to shift in a new direction. Rather than be an initiator of research, it became a facilitator for projects across the university. By the following decade, then-Director James Prothro would improve the institute\u2019s computer facilities to create a Social Science Statistical Laboratory and Data Center. In 1973, just four years after its inception, the IRSS data bank ranked among the best in American universities.<\/p>\n

The Data Archive is now one of the largest repositories of machine-readable social science data in the U.S. Its data sets include the Carolina Poll and the Southern Focus Poll \u2014 two statewide public opinion surveys launched by the institute in the mid- to late-1980s. These studies ultimately led to the 1995 creation of the Center for the Study of the American South<\/a>, a research hub focused on scholarship, conversations, and creative expressions surrounding the study of the South.<\/p>\n

The archive is one of many resources developed by the institute in the 1990s. During that time, Director John Shelton Reed made it his mission to continue the work of his predecessors from the \u201960s and \u201970s and make the institute a resource for researchers from all disciplines on campus.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe had consultants,\u201d Reed explains. \u201cYou wanted advice on sampling or on data analysis, there were people you could talk to. You wanted a guide to census data or government documents, we had people who were familiar with them, what was out there, where to go, how to use them. You wanted help writing a grant proposal, [we] would help you out with that.\u201d<\/p>\n

To bolster this work, Reed and his team initiated a series of short courses on a range of topics in the social and behavioral sciences. Today, the institute offers over 100 of them, with more than 2,250 participants attending each year. \u201c[Odum] needed to be a place where people didn\u2019t say, \u2018I don\u2019t do that because it\u2019s not in my job description.\u2019 It needed to be a place that rose to whatever challenge came along,\u201d Reed says.<\/p>\n

\"Taken
Taken in the 1980s, this is one of the last pictures taken of Howard Odum. He passed away in November 1954. (photo courtesy of UNC Archives)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Research resources<\/h3>\n

At the turn of the century, IRSS was renamed the Odum Institute for Research in Social Science and sociologist Kenneth Bollen<\/a> became its new director. Bollen helped shape the framework that positioned Odum as a research support organization. He pushed for scientific rigor and focused on creating a program for survey research, improving access to spatial analysis software, and strengthening the data archive.<\/p>\n

\u201c[Odum has] one of the earliest social science archives at a university, where data are stored and preserved for future generations,\u201d Bollen says. Today, the UNC Dataverse<\/a> is a free resource for researchers needing to preserve, search and discover, archive, publish, or analyze data. Called data curation, this process makes data FAIR: findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable.<\/p>\n

\n

Tom Carsey<\/a>, a political science professor and Bollen\u2019s successor, spent the next seven years pushing for scientific rigor in the social sciences. He increased attendance at short courses and brought Odum\u2019s services to the forefront. Now, each year, institute staff consult with more than 1,000 researchers who need help with independent projects and join research teams to provide critical resources like data management, cyberinfrastructure, and research reproducibility.<\/p>\n

\u201cTom had a natural way of making everyone around him feel welcome and included,\u201d wrote his colleagues in a Vox op-ed<\/a> after his passing in 2018. \u201cHe began every conversation, class, seminar, or talk with the assumption that everyone in the room had the potential to contribute.\u201d He cared about people \u2014 an attribute he shared with his long-gone predecessor, Howard Odum.<\/p>\n

Carsey also spent a lot of time educating people about R \u2014 an obscure, high-level computer programming language for data management analysis. \u201cIt functions almost like an operating system where people have created all kinds of apps that extend its functionality to do stuff like Twitter scraping, which is crazy for statistics software,\u201d says Todd BenDor<\/a>, director of the institute today. \u201cTom was one of the key factors in pushing R as a framework for social science research and analysis at UNC.\u201d<\/p>\n

Overall, BenDor believes the institute\u2019s most valuable asset is time. \u201cOdum saves people time,\u201d he says. \u201cWe give people efficient ways to push research forward, helping them with projects so they don\u2019t have to do it by themselves. We\u2019re focused on contributing meaningfully to research \u2014 and I think Odum would be very happy to see that something he started still has a really powerful legacy.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Guy Johnson (1901-1991) was Kenan Professor Emeritus of sociology and anthropology at UNC-Chapel Hill. He was one of the first research assistants to join the Institute for Research in Social Science and the first executive director of the Southern Regional Council. He co-wrote \u201cResearch in Service to Society: The First Fifty Years of the Institute for Research in Social Science at the University of North Carolina\u201d with his wife Guion Johnson. <\/em><\/p>\n

Guion Johnson (1900-1989) was a social historian, author, and civic leader who served as a research assistant at the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences from 1924-1934. Her book, \u201cAnte-Bellum North Carolina: A Social History,\u201d is a pioneering work of history. She co-wrote \u201cResearch in Service to Society: The First Fifty Years of the Institute for Research in Social Science at the University of North Carolina\u201d with her husband Guy Johnson. <\/em><\/p>\n

John Shelton Reed retired from UNC in 2000 as the William Rand Kenan Jr. Professor of sociology and director of the Odum Institute for Research in Social Science. He helped found the university\u2019s Center for the Study of the American South and the quarterly publication Southern Cultures. <\/em><\/p>\n

Kenneth Bollen is the Henry Rudolph Immerwahr Distinguished professor in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience and the Department of Sociology within the UNC College of Arts & Sciences. He is also a faculty member in the Quantitative Psychology Program within the Thurstone Psychometric Laboratory, chair of the Methods Core, and a fellow of the Carolina Population Center.<\/em><\/p>\n

Tom Carsey (1966-2018) was the Thomas J. Pearsall Distinguished Professor in the Department of Political Science within the UNC College of Arts & Sciences. From 2011-2017, he served as director of the Odum Institute for Research in Social Science. He passed away on February 21, 2018, after a long battle with ALS. <\/em><\/p>\n

Todd BenDor is the director of the Odum Institute for Research in Social Science. He is also a professor and director of PhD programs and admissions in the Department of City & Regional Planning within the UNC College of Arts & Sciences.<\/em><\/p>\n

By Alyssa LaFaro, Endeavors magazine<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

<\/div>\n
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