Person
William I. Thomas
American sociologist (1863–1947), one of the pioneers of the Chicago School. Known for the sentence “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences” and for his study of immigrants’ letters.
Biography
William Isaac Thomas was born on 13 August 1863 in Russell County, Virginia, and died on 5 December 1947 in Berkeley. He studied at the University of Tennessee, worked on anthropology and sociology in Berlin and Göttingen, and took his doctorate at the University of Chicago in 1896. He taught for years in Chicago’s sociology department and left that post in 1918. In 1927 he was president of the American Sociological Society.
The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1918–1920), written with Florian Znaniecki, used immigrants’ family letters and other personal documents as data and is counted among the foundations of qualitative research in American sociology. Its methodological note puts “the definition of the situation” forward as one of the three elements of a social act. In The Child in America (1928), written with his wife Dorothy Swaine Thomas, the famous sentence first appears; Robert K. Merton later named it the “Thomas theorem”.
Thomas’s idea is a bridge into communication studies: rumours, headlines and conversation are the material through which people come to define a situation.
In this course
Appears in this lesson as the sociologist who collected letters and as the author of the “Thomas theorem”. The Chicago School and Communication
Key works
- Thomas, William I.; Znaniecki, Florian (1918). The Polish peasant in Europe and America: Monograph of an immigrant group. Volume I: Primary-group organization (1st ed.). Boston: Richard G. Badger (The Gorham Press). — Immigrant letters as data; the “definition of the situation” in the methodological note.
- Thomas, William I.; Thomas, Dorothy Swaine (1928). The child in America: Behavior problems and programs (1st ed.). New York: Alfred A. Knopf. — The first printed form of the Thomas theorem.