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This is a preliminary report from a study of occupational mobility in the United States. Objectives of the study are to describe patterns of social mobility in some detail, to estimate the influence of various factors on occupational life chances and to ascertain a few consequences of socio-economic status and mobility, such as their implications for fertility. The present paper reports selected findings pertaining to factors affecting occupational achievement and chances to move away from one's social origins. In particular, researchers examine the significance for occupational attainment of education, ethnic background, community size, migration and parental family. In addition to presenting preliminary substantive findings from this research, this paper also provides an opportunity for illustrating the analytical procedures that have been used. The analysis relies to a large extent on the regression approach. Two major advantages of this approach which prompted this decision to adopt it are that it is a very efficient method of large scale data reduction and that it permits, consequently, the simultaneous examination of interrelations of fairly large numbers of variables, especially if computers are used. Contingency tables containing half a dozen or more variables and many hundreds of cells are too complex to be analyzed by inspection, whereas the regression method permits the analysis of these interrelations.

The purpose of this paper is to show how selective perception operates in organizational settings to make members perceive the behavior of other members differently. The data come from a study directed by researchers P.F. Lazarsfeld and Wagner Thielens of how college teachers in the United States reacted to threats posed to academic freedom during the McCarthy investigations in the early 1950's. More than 2,400 social science teachers from 165 colleges were interviewed. They were asked questions dealing with attitudes toward academic freedom for teachers and students, awareness of specific incidents involving threats to academic freedom, apprehension and fear resulting from such incidents, beliefs about reactions of other teachers to the same events. There exists a considerable literature on experiments designed to test the validity of ideas in the functional approach to perception. Some attempts have been made to state systematic theoretical formulations which try to account for the empirical findings. Expectations, needs and emotional states sometimes make perception selective. People who live in the same milieu or are otherwise exposed to identical stimuli, but who differ with respect to their expectations, needs and emotions will perceive attributes of people or other objects present in the milieu differently. One way in which these factors make perception selective is by increasing people's sensitivity to cues indicating the presence of objects or behaviors relevant to the state of motivation or the attitude.

This paper begins with some conclusions about age at marriage that are consistent with the available data in the United States. A second section considers evidence from American sources that bear on these propositions. Where the generalizations outrun the evidential support, this fact will be noted. In the colonial and early national periods of the U.S. people married quite early. During the nineteenth century the age of marriage rose. From 1890 to 1960 the median age at first marriage has declined about two years for women and three for men. There is a negative correlation between age at marriage and marital stability, i.e., the younger the age at marriage, the less stable the average marriage. There is negative correlation between age at marriage and socio-economic status, i.e., median age at first marriage is lower for the lower socio-economic strata than for the higher. Among those who marry young the level of education completed is relatively low and the proportion of women already pregnant is high.

A conceptual model of the effects of residential relocation of voters upon their voting behavior is elaborated; in this model relocation is related directly to instability of voting preferences, susceptibility to short-term influences and to the weakness of a neighborhood or contextual effect. The interaction effects of voluntary organization affiliation and political involvement are also discussed. A number of hypotheses are derived from the conceptual model and tested with a non parametric measure of association on the basis of survey data from Columbus, Ohio. It is found that the major hypotheses are sustained though the data on the interaction effects of involvement are more ambiguous. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contemporary American Politics the term "conservatism" is used to refer rather wide variety of more or less well organized groups and movements. There are a number of journalistic accounts of the rightwing movements in the United States, but up till recently no scholarly analyses have been published. One problem derives win the recognition that there are a number of different aspects of conservatism. These form a more or less coherent syndrome of attitudes. First, there are the traditional economic issues that have divided conservatives and liberals in American politics. These issues have to do with how much the Federal of State Governments should promote welfare policies for the benefit of "needy" individuals and communities. This dimension is called Economic Conservatism. Second, recent rightwing movements have stressed heavily the alleged danger of Communist subversion in the United States. This refers to attitudes hostile to "New Deal" type measures and includes: rejection of Federal spending on local school construction projects and medical care, the view that laws governing labor unions aren't strict enough, and, as an extreme item, that the Federal income tax should be abolished.

The college campus in the United States is a marriage market of long standing. Over a period of many generations young men and women have looked for and found dates and mates in the conducive environment of the old Alma Mater. In the past, however, these relations merely blossomed out into engagement or at best into a somewhat less formal kind of commitment, though usually not into marriage during the years of school. This is all changed. The campus these days contains a contingent of married students that at some universities adds up to as much as 30 per cent of the total student population. The historic development of student marriages has to be seen of course in the context of the American culture of the 20th century. The spectacular decline of age at marriage in the United States is a relatively recent phenomenon and has been well demonstrated. For the college population the median age of marriage was in 1960 26.0 for men and 23.8 for women who had four or more years in college and for those who had one to three years in college the avenge age at marriage was 25 for men and 21.8 for women.

This main objective of this article is to present a part of the data collected in an explorat study of the use of the semantic differential for measuring social and political images. The data were collected in Finland, and, all in all, Finnish images of over twenty peoples and twenty nations were assessed. Because of the special interest of the Northern lands for the readers of Acta Sociologica, it seems worth-while reporting in some detail the images held by the Finns of themselves and of their Scandinavian neighbors. A second purpose of the study was to investigate the interrelations between two kinds of images, referred to here and subsequently as social images and political images. The former term refers to images held about a specified group of people, while the latter refers to images held about a nation as a nation, that is, as a geographical and political entity. It is commonly believed that these two aspects of national images, can, on occasion, be widely discrepant. For example, such statements as the following are not infrequently heard in the United States: "We have no quarrel with the Russian people, only with their government." Nevertheless, it was hypothesized prior to the data collection that, by and large, these two kinds of images would show a rather high degree of relationship.

The article focuses on the connection between criminality and age. By criminality the more serious offences are meant that are--offences against property, larceny, fraud, embezzlement, the unlawful use or theft of motor vehicles, destruction of property, sex offences, offences against persons and some other offences. Most research workers in the U.S. and in Europe agree that for the offences mentioned above, taken as a whole, criminality reaches a maximum in the ages from 18 to 25 years. The age maximum varies for the individual offences. Breaking and entering reach their peak between the ages of 15 and 25 years, whereas other offences against property lie at a considerably higher age. Motor vehicle theft, on the other hand, centers on the age groups between 15 and 25 years. Sex offences of the active type show a maximum frequency under the age of 25 years, but those of the passive type are concentrated at higher ages. The maximum frequency of offences against the person lies between the ages of 20 and 35 years.

The article presents a study which was initiated to empirically compare two sub-cultures with respect to sociologist D. Riesman's hypothesis, an American sub-culture composed of White and Negro students in two southern state universities and a European subculture consisting of Finnish university students. It was initially assumed that individuals in the inner-directed cultural setting would perceive and hold character traits as having greater importance for them, while students in an other-directed culture would express more concern about group behavior, adjusting to the environment, and getting along with others. According to Riesman, socialization in an inner-directed culture is primarily parent-centered, while socialization in the other-directed society is peer-group oriented. This, in effect, does not make for differences in degree of conformity, but, rather in modes of conformity. An inner-directed culture is characterized by a young, expanding, economic system, where innovation, pioneering, and the so- called old-fashioned virtues of courage, personal ideals, and the ability to stoically cope with overwhelming odds are so important as to be generally held up as the guiding principles of the group.