Srole, L. (1962). Goals and Guidelines of the Study. In L. Srole, T. S. Langner, S. T. Michael, M. K. Opler, & T. A. C. Rennie, Mental health in the metropolis: The midtown Manhattan study (pp. 8-25). New York, NY, US: McGraw-Hill.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/10638-002
From its inception, the Midtown Manhattan Study was intended to serve the purposes of both program and basic research. Project planning by a multidisciplinary team was carried out at length, on both the conceptual and the technical levels of design. Of the several alternative approaches available, the one undertaken in this investigation is that of social psychiatry, representing a recent convergence of medical epidemiology, clinical psychiatry, and the social sciences upon a common borderland of research. This approach advances the general postulate that sociocultural forces hold good or ill potentialities for mental health. It rests, moreover, on a general logic of situation-response evidence and inference derived from medical epidemiology. The relationship of this approach to the biological theories of mental illness was discussed, and the limitations upon the Midtown data were indicated. The chapter also attempts to specify and classify orders of elements in the sociocultural realm as test factors that are potentially relevant to mental health. With the family unit as the crux, these orders range downward in magnitude from the community social system, at one extreme, to detailed patterns of intrafamily functioning (the component variables) at the other. Intermediate were the demographic variables, which were arranged in a typological schema on several taxonomic criteria. The demographic variables are the exclusive focus of the present volume and are a first possible step toward isolating the kinds of families that are respectively pathogenic and eugenic for the mental health of their members. In fine, the Midtown Study seeks to bring into its broad purview both mental well-being and mental morbidity and such sociocultural conditions as may be associated with each. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved)