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The article introduces the topics covered by the Spring 1970, volume 26, number 2 issue of "The Journal of Social Issues". The purpose of the issue is to gain fresh insight into the current state of some aspects of social science, rather than simply to further an understanding of the poor. Social science and psychology have, in some respects, been relevant to an understanding of the poor. Work with poor populations in both laboratory and field has brought new perspectives to the social sciences. It has exposed some of the weaknesses, inconsistencies, and lacunae in both theory and practice. The recurrent themes of the papers in this issue offer some generic lessons about the study of any multi-faceted and value-laden social problem. Each paper in the issue presents the modifications in research strategies and the new theoretical formulations which have evolved from work with poor populations. The papers cover both theoretical content, e.g., in social learning and in sociolinguistics, and questions which are basic to the logic of all scientific inquiry, e.g., generalizations beyond a specific context and the conditions under which causal inferences are feasible.

The article discusses a study which investigates the short term effect of prior social experiences on the productivity of schizophrenics in recreational therapy. Several authors speculated about the social value of recreational therapy in contrast to psychoanalytical value. An author suggested that recreational therapy might help in rehabilitating a patient. Twenty two males and 18 females who were diagnosed as chronic schizophrenics at the Soundview Throgs Neck Unit of Bronx State Hospital in New York City were studied. They were randomly assigned to one of the four groups such as control, discussion, cooperation and dyad. Results supported the suggestion that social interaction may enhance patient functioning.

This paper attempts to show that the myth of the primal horde is of use in that: (1) It helps to account for behavior that is observable at formal meetings, (2) sheds some light on the earlier socialization process and (3) can give some insight into the operation of wider social groupings. This obviously is a formidable task, beyond the scope of any one paper. The author discusses the university seminar of the formal kind where there is a chairman and sometimes a vote of thanks. He hope to show that the myth of the primal horde not merely explains what goes on but can even be said to describe to some extent behavior at such meetings. There is also an attempt to show how the ideas first used in the context of the university seminar can be applied to formal settings that are apparently very different namely those of the military parade and the religious service. Formal behavior, according to the view expressed here, owes its significance to the triumph it celebrates. It must therefore be essentially unstable for where the triumph is too complete there will the need for defensive morality be dissipated.

Building upon the sexual socialization ideas of Gagnon and Simon and others which have stressed male-female differences in premarital sexual behavior, the social and psychological management of the first coital experience is examined. Using data from a 1967 national sample of university undergraduates, the idea of a double standard is explicated in terms of reportage about first coitus—to whom the person reports the event, how many people, how soon, and the like. Evidence pointing to a pattern of male "ego-sex" emerges within the context of the so-called "male bond" (male peers as audiences for sexual prowess), which contrasts sharply with the modal females's management of first coitus. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of future trends in gender styles and premarital sexuality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A study was undertaken to determine the nursery school's role in the transmission of sex role expectations. Analysis was made both of the school's policy on sex roles and the children's perceptions of them. It was found that though the particular school observed was very committed to minimizing this type of socialization, a considerable amount nonetheless took place. In terms of the children themselves, it was noted that most of them had no fixed notions of appropriate behavior for males and females; the fact of sex categories rather was occasionally used by them as an attempted ideology of control. A minority of the children however did show interesting patterns of traditional sex-typed behavior. The paper concludes by pointing out the necessity of observing a wider range of pre-schools to fully understand the specific role played by such institutions in sex role socialization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theoretical and empirical bases are presented in this paper for considering the situation of parents during the period after the children leave the family of orientation as an emergent and identifiable phase of the family cycle. The post parental period is found to be generally a satisfactory one for marital partners although problems arise in role-taking and adult socialization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analysis of the content of small-town weekly newspapers offers a basis for estimating the socializing efficiency of this rural agency. A sample of twelve issues each of twenty Virginia weeklies showed 49 per cent of total space devoted to advertising, 34 per cent to news, 11 per cent to magazine material, and 5 per cent to opinion. Thus, three fifths of the space represented the business side of the newspaper, two fifths the community phase. Interpretation of locally significant events frequently was neglected. Magazine materials were largely non-shop-set. News was of persons, the primary group environment, and local institutions, including government, school, and church. Monthly and seasonal variations were found in type of newspaper content, emphasizing the value of the weekly newspaper as a source for sociological investigations into the nature and activities of the rural community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The family, like all other social units, is a power system, resting to some degree on force or its threat. This paper examines the deterrent value of the actual use of force and the implied deterrent of its threat, as well as the outside supports of the use of force in the family which come from the state, the community, friends, and so on. The role of force in socialization is discussed (with some cross-cultural illustration from the case of Japan), and a series of propositions are presented. A final section explores force which emerges into violence as assault, murder and child abuse, from an exchange perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the stereotypes of women found in six recent marriage and family texts. All were written by male sociologists; all had an original publication date of 1960 or later. Unproved or value-laden statements about the female were placed in four broad categories: sexual attitudes and behavior; sex roles and socialization; mate selection, marriage, and divorce; and the economics of being female. The paper demonstrates that so-called "value-free" social science is full of myths and folklore about the female, which are presented as factual, and are used to justify her subordinate status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a summary and analysis of research and theory on black families in the past decade. In the macro-sociological section the theories on black family life are critically analyzed for their theoretical and methodological validity. The second section presents micro-sociological research findings on black family life and is more of a summary of the research literature on this subject. These research findings are presented according to the typical family stage sequences of black family life, from dating behavior to parental roles and socialization processes. In his overall assessment of works on the black family the author concludes that the imposition of ethnocentric values on the analysis of black family life preclude the application of much of the current research and theory to the development of a viable sociology of the block family. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the extent to which particular socialization techniques are associated with the successful transmission of mothers' educational ambitions for their children. Interviews were conducted with 524 tenth graders and their mothers, residing in eight New Jersey communities. Mothers' educational ambitions for their children were strongly and positively related to the students' own educational plans, regardless of the extent to which they provided the students with culturally enriching activities, pressured them to do well in school, or kept in touch with the schools. This suggests that parental values are transmitted in many alternative ways, rather by specific instrumental behaviors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

George P. Murdock's conception of the universal aspects of the family is examined by reference to the ethnographic literature. The results indicate that the nuclear family is not universal and that only the nurturant socialization function is universal. A revised conception of the family is offered which views the family institution as a small kinship structured group with the key function of nurturant socialization of the newborn. Nuturant socialization of the new-born is conceptualized as a functional prerequisite of human society, and some type of small kinship structured group is viewed as a structural prerequisite of human society for the fulfillment of this function. Three types of evidence are brought to bear on the universality of this definition: (1) cross-cultural evidence, (2) studies of nonhuman primates, and (3) studies of mother separation in human societies. The evidence tends to support the universality of the family definition proposed in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on the factor analytic structure of small group interaction, parent-child interaction, and personality traits is reviewed and interpreted within the framework of a circumflex model. This model uses power and support as reference axes around which other patterns of interaction or of personaltiy can be meaningfully arrayed. The circumflex model provides a theoretical map which can be used to order existing data and to generate hypotheses. Examples of such ordering and of hypotheses are given. Location of socializing agents or groups in the two-dimensional property space formed by the variables of power and support is a minimal essential specification of the social interactional context within which socialization takes place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study compared sex-role attitudes and sex-typed reactions of children from "traditional" middle-class schools and homes (stressing socia1ization toward general standards) with those of children from "modern" middleclass schools and homes (stressing individualized development) Subjects were 105 fourth-grade nine-year-olds Direct and projective technicques were used to test the hypothesis that conventional attitudes and reactivity would be more characteristic of children from traditional backgrounds Findings support the hypothesis unequivocal commitment to own sex role, sex-typed play, aggressive expression in boys, and family orientation in girls were more consistently characteristic of children from traditional backgrounds Girls from modern backgrounds departed most from conventional expectations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the question what is cultural deprivation and how does it act to shape and depress the resources of the human-mind? The arguments presented are first, that the behavior which leads to social, educational, and economic poverty is socialized in early childhood, second, that the central quality revolved in the effects of cultural deprivation is a lack of cognitive meaning m the mother-child communication system, and, third, that the growth of cognitive processes is fostered in famly control systems which offer and permit a wide range of alternatives of action and thought and that such growth is constricted by systems of control which offer predetermined solutions and few alternatives for consideration and choice The research group was composed of 160 Negro mothers and their 4-year-old chddren selected from four different social status levels The data are presented to show social status differences among the four groups with respect to cognitive functioning and linguistic codes and to offer examples of relations between maternal and child behavior that are congruent with the general lines of argument laid out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The adult is everywhere immersed in authority relations. Sometime in the individual life history each person becomes socialized to authoritative behavior as a fundamental mode of human relations. It is the purpose of this paper to illuminate the processes of socialization to authority. We start with the classic definition of authority, namely: a given person designating a course of action/or another person in some circumstance of choice among alternatives, where the alternatives are perceived by both (43). When an individual chooses behavioral alternatives for another, he holds authority over the other person. It is as simple as that. Many traditional analyses of authority have concentrated on the choosing processes, subsequently evolving into a field of analysis known as "decision theory." We do not follow this course. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses socialization correlates of student activism. Studies assessing the intellectual dispositions, academic careers, value systems, and personality characteristics of student activists are amassing. Activists are found to be intellectually gifted, academically superior, and politically radical young people from advantaged homes in which the parents are successful in their careers, comfortable in their economic position, and liberal in their political orientations. The present paper is concerned with extending our understanding of the antecedents of activism as they may be inferred from students' retrospective descriptions of the child-rearing orientations and values of their parents, and identifying socialization practices differentially associated with diverging orientations toward political social activism that could be identified in 1965-1966. The assessment of socialization practices and their relationship to student activism gains importance in the present social climate. The recent change in the character of student activism has tried society's patience and increased its hostility toward activists, resulting in demands for repressive action on the part of societal institutions to control student behavior.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the empirical and theoretical status of socialization and personality factors in the academic failure of Negro youth and to suggest some promising directions for research. The disadvantaged pupil's learning difficulties are attributed to a basic failure of the socialization process in the home. It could also be a reflection of the lack of relevance of the competence goals of the school to the competence goals toward which the child has been socialized by the transmitting agents of his own culture. A key component of the deprivation which afflicts ghetto children is that generally their teachers do not expect them to learn, and have adopted as their concept of their function custodial care and discipline.

Eastern mystical movements operating in America recruit partly from young persons who have previously experimented with psychedelic drugs. This paper argues that these cults serve as a "half-way house" between the drug culture and reassimilation into conventional society. Since mystical experiences share elements with drug sensations, the former can operate as a substitute gratification for the latter and facilitate the termination of drug taking. Since mystical "trips" are less legally precarious and less physically incapacitating than drug "trips," the changeover from drugs to non-chemical mysticism tends to facilitate further adjustments in the direction of adopting conventional routinized life-styles. This analysis is exemplified by a case study of the Meher Baba cult which recruits from the drug culture. The writings of Meher Baba contain some elements which are congruent with the "psychedelic" emphasis on inner exploration and other elements which provide linkages with conventional norms. Baba followers tend to shift their emphasis from the passive-contemplative to the active-service oriented aspects of Baba's teachings as their drug experiences recede into the past. Socialization from the drug culture via Baba into conventional life-styles is thus a gradual process without sharp discontinuities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is a sign of the times that a person who considers himself a professional sociologist and who wants to remain in communication with his colleagues dares write a paper in which he suggests that an image of man rooted in one of the strands of the Judco-Christian tradition may be better suited to the ordering of sociological data than those models currently in use. Theology, the human attempt to reflect upon commitment, occupies no privileged position in this tradition and neither it, nor the Church, has any authority to dictate or establish the content of empirical knowledge. The image of a man dominant in current sociology and social psychology is that of the person determined, within the limits set by a permissive biological inheritance, by society and culture. Complete determinism is presupposed in this image and a psychological determinism that would view the personality as a dynamic system in its own right is subordinated to societal and cultural determinism. Culture and society have endured forever and that it is the eternal fate of the person to be contained within the process of socialization and the structure of statuses and roles.

Using the 1956-1958-1960 SRC American panel data and the 1965 Jennings-Niemi socialization data, this paper first presents some estimates of the extent of measurement error in several standard face sheet items. After the presence of measurement error is demonstrated, two techniques involving multiple indicators and observations over time are employed to estimate the effects of measurement error on bivariate correlation coefficients with party identification providing the substantive vehicle of the analysis. In general, the analysis suggests that random measurement error may have a major impact on our coefficients and thereby result in misleading inferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper is intended to add to the much needed empirical knowledge of the correlates of these varying types of family organization. The study reported views conjugal power types as socialization environments, and seeks to explore the relationship between conjugal power type and selected aspects of an adolescent son's personality. The conceptual framework guiding this research is the view of the family as a small-scale social system. "System" is here defined as a structure in which a change in one element necessitates changes in other parts of the structure. It follows, therefore, that variations in conjugal role structure have consequences--not necessarily all manifest--for both the internal processes of the family system and for the family's mode of relationship to external systems. Among the most important of these is the type of socialization environment provided by different types of conjugal power structure. The general hypothesis is that those types of family structures which optimize the smooth internal functioning of the family system are relatively less successful in socializing children for achievement roles external to the family. Conversely, those types of family structures which are effective in training boys for achievement roles in systems external to the family tend to do so at the cost of heightened intrapsychic tension and lowered familial integration.

This article contains a brief survey of research studies on the effects of parent education and a discussion of possible directions for future research in this area. Authors have been concerned only with those evaluation studies of parent education which have an adequate research design and which permit conclusions based on statistical inference. Parent education may be defined as an activity which uses educational techniques to influence parental role performance. Therefore, all studies which evaluate programs using educational, in contrast to therapeutic influence procedures and which are directed to influencing the parental, rather than some other role fall within the scope of this paper. Research on parent education effects would profit if more attention were paid to conceptualization of the problem. Much of the existing work has been impoverished in its theoretical conceptions. Apparently no evaluation studies have been concerned with the social setting of the parental role.

Aspects of the Parsons-Bales theory of socialization processes provide a basis for propositions pertaining to the father's role with severely retarded children. Data are presented which tend to support hypotheses predicting that fathers of severely retarded children are less adaptable than are mothers and are apt to be more vulnerable to socially imposed criteria and extrafamilid influences. Additional hypotheses are proposed which suggest a number of consequences of father? sensitivity to extrafamilial pressures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study compares 416 high school boys from farm, working class, and middle class families on evaluative, cognitive, and affective aspects of entrepreneurial orientation. The hypothesis predicting that farm reared boys would be the least entrepreneurally oriented of the three occupational class groups was supported: farm boys had the lowest scores on the Business Values Profiles, the Business Knowledge Test, and the Business Career Interest scale. Middle class boys had the highest scores, and scores of sons from working class families fell in between but were closest to the farm group. The findings are interpreted in the light of previous research on the socialization of farm and working class boys, and in relation to the potential role strain engendered by the low entrepreneurial orientation of the occupational classes from which most small businessmen are recruited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports results of a study of high school students attending inner-city schools in a large northern city and in a large southern city in order to identify some personality factors which are predictive of the Negro student's capacity to utilize his intellectual potential to achieve academically. It is assumed that social position determines values, and values in turn influence behavior. The behavior in question acts to determine personality characteristics of students. Thus, a student's achievement behavior is a reflection of the interaction between social position, socialization experiences, and genetic endowment. Therefore, expect family status to be positively related both to achievement behavior and to achievement related personality characteristics. However, it is the end product of socialization that is thought to be most directly related to academic achievement.

In the last several years, two distinct but complementary trends in political science have contributed to an increasing interest in cross-national studies of public policy. First is the burgeoning literature on policy outputs in the U.S. states. Second, the call by some leading students of comparative politics for a renewed emphasis on the output and feedback loops in models of political systems. The behavioral revolution in political science brought a welcome emphasis on such inputs as political culture, socialization and the role of groups and political parties. The article discusses problems of cross-national policy research and focuses on methods of analysis and major data sources of public policy.

Although differential ranking in science is not readily visible to lay observers, American science is, in fact, sharply graded. Rewards and facilities for research are concentrated among relatively few investigators and organizations. This distinctive pattern of stratification, at odds with the egalitarian ethos of science, is not solely attributable to the distribution of talent in the scientific community. There is however a high correlation between assessed contributions to science and investigators' scientific standing. The present pattern of stratification is the outcome of processes of allocation of men and resources among various sectors of science which include selective recruitment and socialization of young investigators, differential access to publication and research facilities, and differential recognition of scientists' contributions through citations to their work and honorific awards. In a time when the legitimacy of reward systems in many social institutions is routinely challenged, scientists are apt to accept their own as just and correct. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article comments on the control policy in the television newsroom. The top management in the American television networks are, of course, in a stronger position than the publisher of a single newspaper or group of newspapers, but like the publisher, they have a company policy. Whereas the press usually has a fairly well-known editorial inclination, the TV news organization formally subscribes to balanced news, although some views are permitted. The balanced product is still in a certain consistent direction. Essentially the problem of seeing how the policy is enforced is recognizably similar for TV news. The socialization of the newsman in television, with regard to the norms of his job, differs slightly from that of his equivalent in the press. As the bulk of TV newsmen were previously trained and acquired their experience on newspapers, a double process of self-selection takes place. First to get into the journalist's profession in the press, second, to move to a TV news organization.

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The article features a discussion on personality and social psychology. Four principles represent the basic generalizations of behavior of all mammals as well as of the human species. Infants respond to social stimulation is the first principle according to Dr. Rheingold. The second principle, that the infant is active in the control of his environment, is a persuasive statement of a fact that has been too long neglected. The third and fourth principles, which concern the modifiability of the infant's social behavior and the corresponding modification of his social environment, represent the first steps in recognizing the major problem in developing a systematic view of the process by which socialization occurs.

The article discusses the natural periods wherein social development occurs. Research shows that the social relationships of human infants occur in five periods including birth, appearance of smiling response, appearance of fear response, motor independence, and talking. There are also periods wherein major changes occur including the neonatal period, primary socialization, transition period, and verbal socialization. However, some changes whether physical or social are gender related, meaning certain factors appears on boys first and some on girls first.

A content analysis is report of child-rearing manuals published in sixteenth to nineteenth centuries and of the themes of the Don Juan plays in seventeenth of twentieth centuries. The relationship between the content of the manuals and the themes of the play supports the thesis that child-rearing patterns advocated in one century are reflected in the next in the attitudes expressed in popular cultural activities towards aggression, achievement and sex roles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the social orientation of children. The authors analyse responses from 482 sixth graders to establish characteristics determining peer versus adult orientation. The findings suggest that children who are peer-oriented tend to conform to undesirable social sub-groups out of necessity, which the authors argue is the result of parental passive neglect. The effect of peer groups on the socialization of children is examined, as well as interpersonal relationships among children within a classroom setting.

The research concerns female homosexuals in the United States, participating in quasi-marital unions with a member of their own sex. The general hypothesis is that they will function using heterosexual complementary marital roles as a model for their behavior, largely as a result of past socialization. The context of this research is the "real" world as opposed to most of the available work in this area which has been done exclusively in controlled environments, i.e., prisons and dormitories. The data were gathered by participant observation and interview. The following specific topics were investigated: (1) perception of sex role by the individual and partner; and (2) sex roles as they were defined by objective criteria. The findings indicate that the female homosexuals in the present study did, in fact, adopt quasi-marital roles similar to those of heterosexual unions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although sibling interaction is a very prevalent form of behavior, it has received relatively little attention by sociologists. The topic is important as one aspect of family behavior and for the effects of the interaction on socialization and other dimensions of family interaction, such as husband-wife relations. The present study analyzes data from over 8000 subjects on sibling affect as related to sex of subject and sibling, age of subject (junior or senior high), older versus younger sibling, and family size. Females are more likely to have high affect toward siblings than males, the same-sex sibling is preferred, affect is higher, on the average, toward older than younger siblings, it decreases with age, and is stronger in two-child families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It was hypothesized that socialization within an achievement-oriented culture would encourage children to adjust the amount of contingent sell-reward according to the length and difficulty of a task. Second-grade children completed long-easy, long-difficult, short-easy, and short-difficult versions of 3 tasks and set their own amount of reward following each. Long tasks were judged to merit greater amounts of reward than shorter ones, but the effect of difficulty varied across tasks. It is proposed that an additional factor, namely, the quality or accuracy of performance, was also governing level of self-reward. Individual differences in amount of sell-reward were consistent across tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on a study on self-definition and social definition in women. The study is designed to identify and measure patterns of verbal expression that are associated with planning a career versus those associated with planning marriage and a family without a career among women college undergraduates. Further investigation of the behaviors and background characteristics associated with these two verbal patterns suggests that they define the end points of a general personality dimension of self versus adjustive social definition. For some time, women were excluded from psychological research and theory and attention was concentrated on the study of men. Quite naturally, then, much of the early research on women focused on the ways in which they differed from men the study of sex differences, rather than the study of the psychology of women. Researchers readily found some sex differences and interpreted them as deriving from differences in genital morphology, hormone differences, differences in the distribution of muscle and other less specific biological differences. A second interpretive line was later introduced by some researchers who proposed that sex differences were due to differential socialization procedures for boys and girls.

Data collected in a Taiwanese village were used to test predictions derived from Lambert's exchange theory of family structure differences in child training (1971). Thirty-seven women with children between the ages of 4 and 10 were interviewed about their socialization practices, and a number of questions concerning independence training were selected for analysis. As predicted, mothers in extended families were considerably less likely to train their children to be self-reliant, but it was not clear that this difference could be attributed to the grandmother's role as a "low-cost" parental surrogate. Several alternative explanations are considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship of sex role attitudes of college youth to parental characteristics and socialization influences were investigated in a survey. A cumulative-type attitude scale was developed to measure feminine social equality (FSE) orientation. Results of multivan ate analyses revealed a marked positive relationship of youths' FSE orientation to (a) the salience of mother, rather than father, in attitudinal socialization, (b) the educational attainment of mothers, but not of fathers, and (c) the extent of mother's involvement in occupational roles outside the home during the respondent's school years. FSE attitudes were also found to be related to religious faith and ethnic background. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As divorce rates continue to climb in North America, we find no emergent normative setting to help alleviate extramarital sexual problems within the marital relationship. Although we are faced with increased opportunity to participate in extramarital sexuality, we are still confronted with old and often dysfunctional normative settings to accommodate problems which arise in extramarital sexual expression. A survey of three dare sources, courtroom cases, survey data, and clinical cases, suggests that in general males are heavily socialized in instrumental and aggressive ways. Violence in family conflict seems to be more usual than commonly thought to be the case, in part due to male socialization, heavy individualism, and female passive-aggressive input. Data from court cases and survey data suggest strong male norms of aggressiveness as culturally appropriate, inhibiting good male-female relations at many levels. Those seeking alternatives to conventional marriage enjoin the struggle in the hope of establishing more rational modes of heterosexual interaction: their struggles are often confounded by past socialization, intrusion of sex-seekers, and ambiguity and difficulty with structuring new norms. Means to achieve more rational adaptations are discussed and include recognition of where we are and use of social science knowledge to further humanistic possibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Students at a large university, a small, church-related college, and a theological seminary were surveyed for the purpose of identifying familial factors which might account for "hawkish" attitudes toward war, under the assumption that some parents, as socialization agents, transmit pro-war attitudes to the young. In general, the data intimated that pro-war students were more frequently from lower-class and rural origins; from families which held conservative values and stressed conformity in parent-child relationships; and thus apparently from families which have accepted more traditional solutions in problem-solving. The data supported both the theories of "status politics" and the "authoritarian personality." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question of universals is important for delimiting a socioligical approach which ought not result in quasi-metaphysical statements. A universal must be a function and structure which is found over time and space, and must, therefore, be conceptualized as conditional. A re-examination of Reiss' treatment of the universality of the family leads to an acceptance of nurturant socialization as a conditional universal function, but to a rejection of kin structure in favor of a non-specific self (or selves) - infant conditional universal structure. The "family" as a conditional universal may be defined as the order of infant self-investiture. This definition should aid the investigator to avoid the fallacy and value position of sociocentrism, i.e., absolutizing a past structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The conceptual framework is an attempt to focus attention upon the normal course of development of family relationships and upon the concepts formed in these relationships. The initial steps in developing such a framework required the replacement of such concepts as identification, learning, and primary and secondary socialization with new terms combining their contents in such a way that interdefinition would be more likely to occur. The concept familization was created as an alternate to prior conceptions and was then linked to a parallel concept of socialization. It was thereby possible to integrate the joint processes of familization and socialization with the structural elements deriving from them. This was termed the universe of meaning and its components were defined as the familial concept, alignment concepts, parental and sibling concepts, the marital concept, the self-concept and a corresponding array of role concepts with regard to family interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The A filler and Swanson thesis that families classified as entrepreneurial tend to emphasize self-control for their children and those classified as bureaucratic tend to emphasize submission to external control was empirically tested in this study. No sup port was found for this thesis. Additional support for the use of occupation, education and income in explaining the variation in parental values is presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An attempt was made to isolate and test a set of hypotheses which explain the relationship between the female's dating role and her reasons for dating. The primary explanatory variable was "stages of courtship." Through the use of survey methodology, with a sample of 396 college women and 181 college men, it was discovered that (1) girls who are random dating are assertive and they date for recreational purposes, (2) girls who are going steady are assertive-receptive and they date for the purposes of mate selection, and (3) girls who are pinned/engaged are receptive and they date for the purpose of anticipatory socialization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Because of parallels discovered between changes in patterns of middle-class infant training and practices advocated in parent-education literature, studies of the latter have generated interest among social scientists working in the areas of socialization and parent education. The present study presents an analysis of the editions of Infant Care published since the Wolfenstein study, as well as a similar analysis of Spock's Baby and Child Care. The general emphasis on permissiveness found in the early 1950's continues currently in both these sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The role of the father in socializing children was examined by studying effects of his absence on 9 to 11-year-old boys and girls. Forty-seven children in low socioeconomic-status, father-absence comes were compared with a matched control group with fathers present. Variables studied were the children's concepts of parental roles, their attitudes and feelings about family members, their peer relationships, and their self-concepts. Many similarities and few differences between the groups were found. Discussion suggests matching the groups on socioeconomic level and also the use of low socioeconomic status subjects as factors influencing the results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]