In 1892, Hull-House began engaging in a programme of empirically driven research. During a first phase spanning 30 years, residents of Chicago's first settlement drew on two statistically based methods pioneered by English reformer Charles Booth, the social survey, together with interviews, statistical analysis and the use of social cartography. Together, these techniques became part of the Chicago settlement workers’ preferred methodological toolkit for championing social reform. Feminist social historians have documented the influential role that these mostly female researchers/reformers played in establishing the place of numeric-based evidence for examining the social and economic conditions of American urban life (Sklar, 1998; Lunin Schultz, 2007). Chicago-based settlement workers were also instrumental in their use of numbers to ‘depauperise thinking’ (O’Connor, 2001: 12) about the living conditions of poor immigrants and migrants living in American industrialising urban areas, shifting attention away from moral behaviours and character to the study of structural and social factors conditioning poverty and illness. These same workers also introduced several research innovations that would later become foundational to American sociological research, including the focus on household-based wages and household budget-based indexes of poverty (O’Connor, 2001; Lunin-Schultz, 2007). Numerically based, spatial mapping of patterns of socioeconomic conditions, another innovation and a key focus of this chapter, set a precedent for future considerations of the social ecologies of poverty, illness and delinquency (O’Connor, 2001).

The numerical evidence dotting the pages of at least 14 research reports published by Hull-House residents during the period from 1893 to the late 1920s (Dando, 2017) were without question understood by the researchers to be objective representations of the realities of life in the immigrant wards of Chicago (Addams, 2007 [1895]: 45). And yet, despite this turn to numerical evidence, other non-numeric, more experiential, affective and aesthetic knowledges were bundled into these reports. This chapter historicises our contemporary period's predilection for numerical-based evidence as a preferred and, at times, unquestioned knowledge source for orienting social work's interventions and practices of care (Okpych and Yu, 2014). It does this by looking back to a period in which numericity and the appeal to objective knowledge were just gaining legitimacy in the nascent practices of knowledge production in American social work.