Community-Based Participatory Research at Hull House in the 1890s

Community-based participatory research (CBPR) is the modern name for a style of research that was pioneered by settlement house residents and other early social work researchers (Sohng, 1996). In this article, presented to the 21st annual session of the National Conference of Charities and Correction, held in Nashville in 1894, Hull House resident Julia C. Lathrop describes the settlement’s research program in its early years. Hull House had been founded in Chicago’s Nineteenth Ward on the city’s Near West Side in 1889 by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr and had attracted the attention of social scientists because of its unusual approach to urban life and to social research. Daniel Fulcomer, a lecturer in Sociology at the University of Chicago, invited Lathrop to discuss Hull House’s sociological research following his paper reporting on a survey on the teaching of sociology in colleges and universities (Fulcomer, 1894). Fulcomer was probably aware of the survey of the Nineteenth Ward that had been recently completed by Hull House resident Florence Kelley for a US Department of Labor publication on city slums, which would be expanded and published in 1895 as HullHouse Maps and Papers. Rather than launching into a description of the research, Lathrop (1894) first described the neighborhood in which Hull House was located and the settlement’s program. “Every activity of the House has sprung out of some neighborhood need” (p. 314), she said, providing the context for the settlement house’s research activities. She went on to describe the settlement house program, ending with a brief description of two research projects, the survey that would result in Hull-House Maps and Papers (Residents of Hull House, 2007) and a study of dietary practices of five ethnic groups in the Hull House neighborhood. Hull House “is constantly adding to its stores of recorded data upon all the matters with which it has to do” (p. 316), she concluded. It was possible to gather information because the settlement house’s “acquaintance gives