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Stratification in science has received extensive attention from researchers in the sociology of science. The general research strategy involves identifying certain socio-personal characteristics of scientists such as professional age, highest degree, prestige of training and affiliated institutions, and relating these characteristics to the reward systems in science. Two identifiable reward systems in science involve (1) the bestowal of honorary awards, and (2) the access to, and recognition in, the formal communication system in science. These two systems both contribute to the overall stratification of the reward system but differ on at least two counts. This paper attempts to examine the stratification of the formal communication system in American sociology as it is related to the stratification of scientists. It is found that the visible journals in sociology are consistently stratified according to criteria such as rejection rates, articles rejected but eventually published in other sociological journals, order of submission preferences of ASA meeting authors, and cross-citation patterns in articles of the journals.

This paper takes issue with some recommendations that have been made for communication and motivation in family planning programs and suggests some ways in which family planning marketing may be improved. The author agrees that family planning programs should initially emphasize information, facts, and logistics, and that the subsequent campaign should aim at the best pros-peas, emphasize self-interest, belay the audience's distrust of the communicator, make post-delivery visits to the mother, work with impersonal messages, and legitimate the behavior that it wants to stimulate. But he suggests that private, personal communication has not been shown to be most efficient; that amounts of information should be large, not small; and that messages should be distributed as widely as possible and be as various as possible. In the end, an appropriate message-accounting system and an explicit consideration of the dollar- value of each "customer," when imposed upon these principles of hard-nosed advertising experience, will be invaluable to the growth and success of the family planning campaign. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the importance of the annual convention to the American College of Gastroenterology in the U.S. Function of the annual convention; Ways by which communication of ideas pertinent to gastroenterology is achieved by the organization; Types of participants chosen for the panel discussions and postgraduate course of the organization.

The purpose of the article is to demonstrate how entropy and some theorems of the theory of information may be useful in the domain of classification, both for class formation and for class identification. Starting from a sample of subjects who have given different answers to a battery of tests or items, researchers see that there can be two kinds of approaches. Firstly, on the basis of entropy one can sort out the tests that have higher information content and on this basis form classes of subjects whose homogeneity can be appraised. In this case the problem is therefore to form a certain number of homogeneous classes with the minimum number of tests. Secondly, once the classification of subjects has been made, it is possible, according to the theory of information, to see whether the typical sequence of subjects of the different classes can be established also through fewer tests, being it then possible also to recognize a distance between the different classes. With this method researchers try to arrive at homogeneous classes on the basis of the smallest possible number of tests, that is in effect choosing variables with the greatest discriminating power.

The article discusses various shortcomings and imperfections inherent in mass surveys as a research tool used in sociological investigations. The different aspects of social differentiation are the customs of the society with regard to making interpersonal contacts outside the context of primary group relations, the degree of free expression and of its individuation and the degree of the acculturation of surveys in the society. According to the article, the full acculturation of survey techniques in a society may be effected by the quantitative familiarization of the population with surveys, a general rise in educational attainments, facilitating the understanding of the scientific purpose of surveys, as well as the role of science in general, and the popularization through mass media of the idea of surveys and their role in society. Mass surveys require an elaborate institutional infrastructure. The formulation of the researcher's questionnaire is made intuitively and it therefore requires methodological consultations.

This article provides information on the decision of a small group of students, members of the Graduate Sociology Club, to create the "Sociological Abstracts" (SA) journal in 1952. For them it was better to produce a 28 page journal than to delay until the coming year and risk losing the esprit de corps which made the effort possible. SA has helped break the linguistic and intellectual barriers to communication. By November 1972, readers who faithfully perused SA from 1953 would by now have had an opportunity to note 924 articles originally published in over a dozen Soviet journals without a reading knowledge of Russian. They could have seen 2,495 articles which were published in various countries using Spanish as their native tongue. Whether SA is used for current awareness of the width and breadth of the sociology literature throughout the world, or whether SA is used to trace the intellectual antecedents of a problem, there is no other encyclopedia, reference book or library which contains quite as many units of information on sociology as does SA.

The article records the evidence in India of a new and unusual mass communications strategy in that country's family planning program. India's brave radical departures in mass motivation techniques are worth study because they hold promise of unprecedented payoffs at reasonable cost, within the pressing time limits of national fertility control programs in the crucial developing countries. India herself, by virtue of the massive attention she has received from aid-giving countries, exemplified diagrammatically the unhappy record of mass communications at work in a national development program. The first important fact that struck the Indians in their examination of their mass media program was that the press, radio and films reach only an estimated 20-25 percent of the population, mainly in the urban and semi-urban concentrations, where the need for motivation is least. The Indian program must reach out to the minds of some 400 million persons. Illiteracy is widespread, incomes are low, and there is little built-in motivation toward family planning. Effective mass media in the vast rural areas are insufficient.