ABSTRACT
The method of functional penetration by a team is put forward as one way of approaching the technical problems involved in analyzing societies, especially of the large and complex industrial type. The field in which the method is now being applied is of industrial unemployment. This method has been called 'functional penetration' by the Dundee investigators. The lesson is that the statistical studies made of social phenomena such as bad housing, malnutrition, poverty, and the like, remained relatively one-sided and lifeless. They were concerned essentially with the accumulation of numerical data about the present situation, and only secondarily with the growth of that situation or the integration of the sociological factors with their wider historical and psychological settings. In psychological experiment the aim is to control both the physical environment and the psychological environment. The most important of these are the control of method and the establishment of significant situations.
