Four years ago a senior by the name of Ralph Kats decided to do his honors thesis by turning social relations methods on the Social Relations Department and then drawing a picture of a field as its concentrators saw it. Last February the department dug up Katz's thesis and adapted it to discover how Social Relations had changed since 1948.

Last week the task of compiling and analyzing the data was completed and the final report submitted to the faculty.

Professor Samuel A. Stouffer and head tutor Joseph A. Kahl were in charge of the project. At the beginning of the term, each concentrator was asked to fill out an anonymous questionnaire before his tutor signed his study card, and over 95 percent of the students complied.

Some of the most significant results gleaned from the study were: 1. The number of men in Social Relations has sharply declined since 1948. 2. The field is not so easy as some people think. 3. Right now the men in the department represent almost exactly a proportional cross section of the college population as far as ethnic group, family income, and type of secondary school education is concerned. 4. There is no "best course" or "best professor."

Since Katz's study the department's enrollment has dropped from 500 to 360, and Kahl attributes the decrease to two factors: the levelling effect of a new and unweildly department finally reaching a period of stability, and the stepped-up program of General Education which allows fewer freshmen to take Social Relations la.

Grew Too Fast

"Of course the department has gotten smaller," Kahl says, "but it may not be smaller than it ought to be, because we really cannot say what would be a normal enrollment." In the years following the department's inception in '46 it grew large very quickly. It was a new field that offered a broad program of study, and at its peak in the class of '50, the department was drawing an over large number of men who were not vocationally interested in the subject matter. These were students who were looking for a general education at a time when the college's General Education program was in an extremely experimental and formative stage. For them Social Relations presented in broad enough field in which to work, and its liberal concentration requirements allowed students to take a wide number of courses outside the department.

But since '48, says Kahl, the department has in a sense found itself. Through the past four years of experimentation the field has become better defined, and although its scope has not changed. It is attracting many more people who are vocationally interested in the social sciences and fewer dilletantes.

Due to the expansion of the General Education program, Kahl finds fewer men taking Social Relations la-in their freshman year, thus making it difficult for a man to discover the field before he is farther along in school. In each of the classes of 52, 53, and '54 about 25 percent of those who took la in their freshman year later became concentrators. But the total number of freshmen in la has dropped 33 percent in the last three years.

Along with this finding, Kahl discovered that almost 45 percent of those men now concentrating in Social Relations had switched from another field.

We cannot assume, he adds, "that the student who comes in late does it because he is looking for the easy way out since on the whole the marks of these students are as good as those who have concentrated in the field since the end of their freshman year.

One of the study's most revealing findings was the destruction of the notion that Social relations is a "gut" department. Kahl decided that the best way to discover the validity of this notion would be to ask the students whether they got better, the same, or lower marks in courses given by the department as in courses outside the field.

The results were remarkable. Twenty-five percent said that their grades in Social Relations-were lower than in other courses, 12 percent said they were higher, and 59 percent answered that they got about the same marks in the field as in their other subjects.

"This would indicate to me," Kahl says, "that the department is not so easy as some people think. And by all indications (in '48 only 18 percent said they had lower grades in Soc. Rel. courses) it is becoming a bit stiffer than before."

Stiffer Marking