Social Disorganization Theory - Ruth Shonle Cavan

Ruth Shonle Cavan

Ruth Shonle Cavan produced Suicide (1928) as a study of personal disorganization in which she confirmed that the mortality rate is relatively stable regardless of economic and social conditions. Despite finding this result, Cavan was excluded from faculty status at Chicago. She served on various research committees for six years and then moved to Rockford College in Illinois. She was particularly interested in dance halls, brothels, insanity, divorce, nonvoting, suicide, and other forms of socially problematic behavior of interest to the political reformers, studying the working lives of "business" girls and their dispersal throughout the zones of Chicago (1929). Partly as a result of her studies, Cavan (1953) emphasized the importance to the efficient functioning of the entire social order of the regulation of sex. While there are variations in the specific arrangements, all societies contain family groups, forbid incest, sanction marriage, approve more highly of legitimate than of illegitimate births, and look upon marriage as the most highly approved outlet for sexual expression of adults. She has continued the work to review delinquency in different countries (1968), returning to write of the Chicago School itself in 1983.