University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Institute for Research in Social Science

The Institute for Research in Social Science is the oldest institute of its kind in the United States. It began in 1924 with a grant to the university by the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Foundation. In 1927 it became a permanent institute of the University with Howard W. Odum as its Director. The original purpose of the Institute was to sponsor and to publish research on social and economic conditions in the South and on the role of local government in promoting public welfare.

The Institute for Research in Social Science, the first of its kind in the nation, was formally established at the University of North Carolina on June 30, 1924. It was the brainchild of Professor of Sociology Howard W. Odum, who had come to the University in 1920 and in 1922 had organized the School of Public Welfare. UNC President Harry W. Chase supported Odum's innovative ideas and was instrumental in securing a three-year grant from the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial. With that funding the Institute began operation on September 15, 1924. For the next twenty-five years, it depended largely on grants from foundations; the University contributed little in the way of budgetary support.

The Institute's purpose was to investigate social and economic conditions in the South and to study the roles of city and county government agencies in promoting public welfare. This work, conducted through research assistantships provided to UNC faculty, was overseen by a Board of Governors and a Director. (In 1961 the Institute was reorganized and its Board of Governors replaced by an Administrative Board.) Odum was elected the Institute's first Director in 1927. Under his guidance and that of his successors, the Institute gained distinction for its studies of regionalism, public welfare programs, family structure, and race relations. Many of its studies were published in The Journal of Social Forces or as monographs by the University of North Carolina Press, and through these publications the Institute's impact became national and international. Social Forces, which Odum had established in 1922, eventually became one of the top three sociological journals in the world.

Although Odum intended the Institute to foster cooperation among the social sciences, its focus remained almost entirely on sociology until the 1950s. In 1948 Director Gordon Blackwell proposed a program of research in behavioral science. In 1953 a Behavioral Science Survey Committee was appointed to prepare proposals to the Ford Foundation, which ultimately granted the Institute over $1 million for behavioral science research. Those grants strengthened existing programs and funded the Social Science Statistical Laboratory and a new program in World Area Studies.

Meanwhile, the work of the Institute had coalesced around four integrated programs: the Political Behavior Committee, the Urban Studies Committee, the Organization Research Group, and a group of projects concerning social science aspects of health and the health professions. Encouraged by the Behavioral Science Survey, each of these programs developed its own organizational structure. The Political Behavior Committee spawned the University's Political Studies Program and a program leading to a master's degree in Public Administration. The Urban Studies Committee, established in 1953, united city planning, political science, sociological, and economic studies of urban processes. In 1957, with a grant of $1 million from the Ford Foundation, the Committee undertook an Urban Studies Program. At the conclusion of that grant in 1962, the Institute established the Center for Urban and Regional Studies. In 1969 the Center became an independent agency of the Consolidated University of North Carolina system. The Carolina Population Center also grew in part from the Institute's research in demographics; Institute Director Daniel Price served on the University Committee on Population Studies that established the Center in 1966.

The Institute became an administrative unit of the Division of Academic Affairs upon the creation of that Division in 1954. In September 1965 it moved to the new Division of Advanced Studies and Research. When the position of Vice Chancellor for Advanced Studies and Research was discontinued (August 31, 1967), the Institute returned to Academic Affairs, where its Director reported to the Provost. In the fall of 1990 it was again moved, this time to the oversight of the Vice Chancellor for Graduate Studies and Research.

The Directors of the Institute have been:

For a full treatment of the history and impact of the Institute, see Guy Benton Johnson and Guion Griffis Johnson's Research in Service to Society: The First Fifty Years of the Institute for Research in Social Science at the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill, 1980).