The Chicago School of Urban Sociology refers to work of faculty and graduate students from the University of Chicago during the period 1915 to 1945 and, more directly, to the work of students who studied under Robert Park and Ernest Burgess during those years. This small group of scholars— the full-time faculty in the department of sociology never numbered more than six persons—developed a new theoretical model and research methodology using the city of Chicago as a social laboratory in a conscious effort to create a distinctive field of study within the social sciences (the title of Park and Burgess's 1921 textbook was Introduction to the Science of Sociology). The Chicago School defined the contours of urban sociology for much of the twentieth century, most ...