Group Classification: Dwight Sanderson's Contribution.

From the beginning of his career in sociology, sociologist Dwight Sanderson was committed to the conception of this discipline as a science of the forms of human association, thus taking his stand with the formalists. As the so-called "formal" school came under attack, Sanderson admitted that sociology might indeed deal with phenomena other than forms of association, but "whatever else it may include," he wrote, "sociology deals primarily with the phenomena of groups or the forms of association." Sanderson's ideas about the social group were expressed in fewer publications and they have stimulated less response from sociologists than his views about the community and the family. In a bibliography of his sociological writings, only two of 94 titles refer specifically arid solely to the social group. His work on the community has been taken up and is being advanced. A host of workers are moving ahead in the sociology of the family, but there has been no rush of students toward the group-classification idea.