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The article presents authors personal thoughts on the pursuit of sociological problems. The author intends to retrace his steps along one path of his intellectual career--the path that links two books, titled, "Social Change in the Industrial Revolution," and "Theory of Collective Behavior," and a number of recent articles and papers on sociological theory and psychological theory. The main emphasis in the article was on the need for a determinate synthesis of the several classes of variables that are essential for the explanation of collective behavior such as cultural, social, psychological, ecological and other variables. In attempting to sort out the major influences on his choice of sociological problems, he resorts to a device that he find congenial and helpful: to arrange these influences in a series extending from very general, predisposing influences which have steered his intellectual interests to the very specific, immediate influences that have determined a particular strategy of analysis in working on a sociological problem.

This paper is critical of some uses made of the "ideal type" and of the fruitless efforts to grasp the significance of this basic tool of science through the work of Max Wetter. Weber, a genius in many respects, did not have a scientifically mature grasp of the class of logical devices to which the ideal type belongs, namely, idealizations, which in the older sciences represent an inevitable, almost commonplace, research strategy. idealization; we suggest, may conveniently be thought of as falling along a continuum between the propaedeatic and the theoretical. Most of Weber's types and most others used in sociology either do violence to the basic strategy of idealizations or fall close to the propoedeutic extreme of the continuum. However, a few idealizations which remarkably approximate the purely theoretical ones found in physical science are available in the discipline, although they are not recognised as such. Several of these are herein singled out and briefly discussed. Sociology, we plead, must snake a special effort to recognize the theoretically fertile strategy of the idealization. A roper and deliberate use of this device helps avoid fruitless squabbles about extra-scientific aspects of theories and enhances our chance of getting down to the serious business of theory construction with a focused sense of purpose and a cumulative orientation. Finally, in order to avoid past difficulties, we suggest that the term "ideal type" be dropped altogether from our vocabulary in favor of its less troublesome relation, idealization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how radio programs and motion pictures are conceived as communications. Two basically important questions arise, referring to the person who is communicating, and the subject that is being communicated. But these issues do not completely cover the complex psycho-social problems of films and radio. There are at least three characteristics of the communicative situation created by the mass media which make it unique: 1) size, diversity, and psychological complexity of the audience; 2) dynamic, creative, and selective character of the audience reaction; and, 3) the uniquely evocative character of the stimulus values.

The article discusses various aspects of the social psychology of sociology. The relationship of sociology to socio-political activism has been widely, if often sterilely, discussed in the abstract. In the concrete, however, the probability that the people who fill roles as socialists will engage in such action has received little attention. On the one hand, the discipline has experienced a secular rise of emphasis on becoming truly scientific, hard-nosed, and mathematical. Probably the bulk of those with the greatest prestige and, therefore, in control of the various sociological associations and major graduate departments, share such an orientation. On the other hand, a relatively newer trend although never totally absent in the history of the discipline toward relevant, humanistic, although not necessarily activistic, sociology is increasingly being rewarded by some sectors of the public. Probably most of the latter adherents are assistant professors and students, namely, the powerless. The probability of social action on the part of sociologists, where it exists, thus resides in precisely the group with the least experience in the discipline.

Like all interpersonal behavior, violent behavior is constructed within a situation by its participants. Structural determinants have insufficient explanatory power precisely because they do not account for the large amount of variation among actors and between situations. Aa an alternative, the violations of relational rules are examined, for such violations may be perceived as threats to the situated identities of the participants. The subsequent negotiation of identities and implementation of threat-reduction tactics precede and facilitate violent encounters. The movement from a heightened identity threat to the initiation of violence as a threat-reducing tactic may then be accounted for in terms of the following structural variables: subculture of violence, experience, intoxicants, audience, cost of failure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on rural psycho-social problems. In discussing any social psychological problems of either rural or urban life, it is necessary to keep in mind two factors which are complements of each other and are constantly cooperating in the production of results, but which nevertheless must be kept separate in logic as a method of distinguishing and defining processes at work. These are the mental or psychic characteristics of people and the environments which impinge, directly or indirectly, upon the human organism or groups of such organisms and thereby produce psychic consequences, individually or collectively, in these organisms and groups. Hence, one must define and measure both the personalities and the environments which interact and produce each other. Second task will be the classification of problems of psychic and psycho-social adjustment in rural people and in rural life with a view to the discovery of the nodal points at which knowledge should be sought or investigations made.

he article presents a report of the 1944 Census of Current Research Projects conducted by the Society's Committee on Social Research. The number of projects is 311, an increase of 35 over 1943. Increases in reported projects occurred in all fields except Social Psychology, Criminology, and Social Problems and Social Work. The largest increase was in the History and Theory of Sociology. However, such relationships to last year's totals should be used with great caution since there is no way of knowing what proportion of each year's projects are reported. As in the past the titles of projects have been classified in conformity with the first choices of their authors, except when such a policy led to groups of too few projects to be classified separately. The items in each group are also arranged alphabetically. Cross references provided at the head of each group refer to the serial numbers of related projects listed in other groups. Likewise submitted is a report on projects underway in government agencies and in private research organizations. Some agencies are missing because of the confidential nature of their work; others because of curtailment of research activity.

An argument for the adoption of a terminology of social interaction and controls better adapted to the now accepted viewpoints of modem physics, biology, and general semantics. The word situation alone is spatial and static. The word process alone has only the time dimension. Both represent abstractions from the totality of actuality-experience. A situation changing through time, a situation- process, is still an abstraction in the sense of being a selected segment-period of the Total Space-Time Manifold; but it does include and suggest the undivided and indivisible reality within its field. The social controls, especially telic (purposive) controls, are reconsidered as situation-processes, in which each "situation" produces or emerges as its own successor in toto. Reversibility, reflexion, prediction, compensation, and emergence of novelty (impredicted, predicted or chosen), are discussed. In a sense, the greater the possible control, the less reliable can prediction of behavior be, on the human level. The applicability of the situational approach to personal and societal problems is further expanded by the conception of situation-process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on some of the objectives of the Activists' Corner section of the "Journal of Social Issues." Psychologists are urged to become social advisors and to make social psychological wisdom available to men of action, and an attempt is made to influence the Men of the Academic Establishment to change Doctor of Philosophy educational programs so that such advisors and men of wisdom could be turned out. But, it just may be that there simply exists no market for this wisdom. The young activist, having found social psychology so wanting, may have long ago come to the conclusion that social psychological ideology can only be the opiate of the revolutionary, and that he will have none of it.

This article focuses on the procedures in analyzing the content of mass media in the U.S. For many years, students of public opinion have sought valid ways of estimating the influence of mass media of communication. Just after the first World War, interest is directed at propaganda and most of the effort go into propaganda analysis. In 1937, the Institute for Propaganda Analysis which published monthly analyses of campaigns and popularized the seven devices of the propagandist, is founded. Furthermore, propaganda analysis involved the very real difficulty of differentiating propaganda on the one hand from news, education, entertainment, and scientific findings on the other.

This article examines the involvement of ego in mass media sector. The mass media of communication are products of the revolutionary technological developments of modern times. As such, they are subject to control by those who own the means of production and transportation. The content of newspaper columns, movies, or radio broadcasts is not determined solely by news value or intrinsic newsworthiness or entertainment value. It is significantly affected in accordance with the personal involvements, conscious or unconscious, on the part of the publishers, owners, producers, and their friends.

The article provides information on sociology, as an academic subject, at various leading universities in the U.S. At University of California, Los Angeles, the questions varies from methodology, ethnomethodology, formal organizations, sociology of knowledge, adult socialization, juvenile delinquency to poverty; at Cornell University each graduate student in the Ph.D. program in sociology selects a major area of study and two areas in which he minors. The major specialty area is presently selected from four that are offered by the department: Social Organization and Change, Demography-Ecology, Research Methodology, and Social Psychology. The subjects are social stratification, social psychiatry, social psychology, sociology of religion, sociology of development, demography and ecology, general rural sociology, deviant behavior and social problems, social organization, deviant behavior and social disorganization et al.