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One significant way of viewing the life of an individual is in relation to what has been termed his life course. This has two components— life goal and career. Life goals are those aims which have highest value, can be attained only after a relatively protracted series of activities, and become the person's reason for existence. The series of activities engaged in to achieve these goals constitutes a career. The life goals give purpose and meaning to one's life, the career directs and organizes life. relatively little scientific research has been undertaken on the third and fourth stages of middle age. The present paper deals with the results of a study of the life course in middle age. The middle age adjustments described in the paper are found in the U.S. and can be shown to depend upon the nature of American culture. Two cultural factors stand out. In the first place, the social organization is mobile so that more individuals aspire to life goals which will improve their class position. In such cases, the pursuit of the chosen life course involves a good deal of conscious effort, the individual is constantly aware of the great amount of time and energy he has invested in his career.

Services of rehabilitation agencies and facilities tend to be structured to the needs of the larger American culture. It is important, however, to reconsider our social service programs in view of the needs of different cultural groups when providing services that will aid these individuals to move across cultural boundaries. An attempt is made in this paper to develop a model of the individual who undergoes such cultural transition. Such a model Should help define problems in service programs, assess the value of current service activities, and identify areas for developing new services that will aid the overall process of cultural transition. A model of behavior development is outlined, followed by a formulation of a model of the individual in cultural change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes cultural changes which have occurred since pioneer days in a rural, east Wisconsin German ethnic island. The social process is considered in terms of cultural history, geography, mobility, and enmeshment of the area in the dominant American culture. To determine the nature and degree of changes in ethnic values and attitudes, attention is focused on farming methods, family functions, and cultural conflict. The area has succeeded in making easy adjustments to the American situation and has remained a stable society largely for the following reasons: a traditional pattern of a diversified agriculture, coupled with a willingness to experiment and to conserve soil fertility, a climate and soil suited to this type of farming, acceptance of dairying to assure a cash income, a unique local outlet for excess farm produce, familism, settlement in a large compact group, and contact with an urban culture quite similar to its own. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

John Dewey once characterized Americans as a people thirsty for absolutes. In the areas of culture and civilization, however, it appears that not too much progress has been made toward a definitive distinction. The "Cumulative Book Index" lists five cross references for "culture"—civilization, value of college education, learning and scholarship, self culture and education. This paper represents an attempt to clarify the structure of the concepts culture and civilization to the end that a more definitive use of the terms may be proposed. It also will attempt to provide illustrations of various ways the terms themselves have been and are being used. In order to begin such a review it becomes necessary to propose certain limitations of meaning and usage that will allow the reader to follow the discussion more readily. An attempt was made to clarify the structure of the concepts culture and civilization by the use of a schematic design within which were placed arbitrary thresholds designating different stages in the development of man's non-biologic life.

John Dewey once characterized Americans as a people thirsty for absolutes. In the areas of culture and civilization, however, it appears that not too much progress has been made toward a definitive distinction. The "Cumulative Book Index" lists five cross references for "culture"—civilization, value of college education, learning and scholarship, self culture and education. This paper represents an attempt to clarify the structure of the concepts culture and civilization to the end that a more definitive use of the terms may be proposed. It also will attempt to provide illustrations of various ways the terms themselves have been and are being used. In order to begin such a review it becomes necessary to propose certain limitations of meaning and usage that will allow the reader to follow the discussion more readily. An attempt was made to clarify the structure of the concepts culture and civilization by the use of a schematic design within which were placed arbitrary thresholds designating different stages in the development of man's non-biologic life.

The article presents information on evidence of social disorganization. The processes of disorganization which underlie the external evidences so painfully clear to everyone antedate the World War and the stock market collapse of October, 1929. It will be pointed out shortly that the roots of the current disintegration arc embedded in the early history of American culture. In this situation many groups and interests are striving for recovery. Besides the "Brain Trust" and the Administration, several progressive political movements have appeared and organized labor has made some advance. In these efforts the intelligentsia have had and still have their chance as never before in people's political life. Among these groups are the social workers, and the purpose of this introductory paper is to set the stage for an evaluation of their efforts toward reconstruction. This will be done,by indicating the major symptoms of disorganization, analyzing the processes involved, and describing some of the characteristic responses that are being made to the present situation.

The present paper examines cultural beliefs about success, reflected in stereotypes about social classes, and their influence upon the degree of correspondence between objective class position and subjective class identification. The formulated hypothesis stating that the greatest degree of discrepancy between objective and subjective class position will tend to be found in the social classes most affected by unfavorable cultural stereotypes was supported by data available in two contrasting cultural milieus: the United States and Greece. The greatest degree of discrepancy is found in the American lower class and the Greek upper class which are most affected by corresponding negative stereotypes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's views on social researcher Milton L. Barron and his study on juvenile delinquency and American values. He remarks that Barron has presented a very suggestive paper and that his review of the literature regarding values contains many important evaluative insights. Agreeing with Barron's delineation of positive and negative values, the author says that he believes that an analysis of the substitutive or compensatory values in American culture may be well accepted.

The article introduces several papers about the problem of anti-intellectualism in the United States from a number of perspectives. These perspectives include historical, political, economic, sociological, educational and psychological. Alfred L. Kroeber advances the thesis that fine arts, among other achievements of Western civilization, are reaching a stage of imitation and repetition which may conceivably signalize a period of cultural decadence. Leuchtenburg in his article, mentioned Marxism as an intellectual or anti-intellectual force in American culture.

Examines the cultural change in relation to physical and cultural influences of American archeology in the Southwestern States of the U.S. Changes of full glacial ecology; Evaluation of artifacts; Question of terminology for stone technology.

The present paper is the last in a series of three, all of which deal with premarital sexual intimacy compared cross-culturally. The cultures involved are an Intermountain area of the United States, which is predominantly Mormon and is relatively conservative or restrictive in its sexual outlook; a Midwestern section of the United States, which may be regarded as somewhat typical of the country as a whole; and Denmark, which, like the rest of Scandinavia, is relatively liberal or permissive in its sex norms. The two previous reports, by means of several statistical measures, demonstrated the sexual restrictiveness of the Intermountain culture and the sexual permissiveness of the Danish culture, as was originally hypothesized. Questionnaires were carefully constructed, translated into Danish, pretested several times on both sides of the Atlantic, revised on the basis of the pretests, and then administered during the spring of 1958 to classes in three universities selected from the three cultures under study.

This article presents a study which examined the impact of vertical social class mobility on family integration in the U.S. U.S. social scientists have published a mass of empirical data establishing the fact that social classes do exist in the country and, furthermore, that membership in a particular social class does tend to predict a wide range of behavior patterns from voting habits to kissing techniques. The study covers an investigation of 78 families. These family units were studied through a combination technique of having participant- observer papers written by student members of the families, using an outline provided by the writer. Interviews were conducted with students where further information seemed to be necessary. All of the cases were studied in the setting of a state university and reflected both patterns of vertical mobility and social class continuity. In general, families with social class continuity seem to have more stability and more sociological closeness than families in which either the entire group or some members of the group have been moving from one social class to another. The initial theory was based on the assumption that if social class is the basic variable which research implicitly assumes, then social class mobility must be one of the most powerful forces affecting family cohesion in U.S. culture.

The article presents information about the comparative approach applied to the study of contemporary Jewry, which adds an important dimension to the research and interpretation of individual Jewish communities. Most present research analyses the local community in the context of its native environment and its adjustment to that environment. With the comparative method, one can explore the common relationship of Jewish communities throughout the world while taking into full account the problems of locus and specific historical configuration. Thus a particular Jewish community can be studied not only in its relation to the environing culture, but also in the total context of the Jewish people. The object of this paper is to delineate, by way of comparison, some of the disparate and common elements in the three major Jewish centers of the western hemisphere, Canada, the United States, and Argentina. The selected disparate element relates to the varying forms of representative organization of the Jewish communities as their respective majority, or host cultures influence them. The common element refers to the nature of individual identification with Jews and Judaism, a problem that is similar in the three communities.

The article reports on a study which has attempted to measure some of the effects of Intercultural Workshop experiences upon the ethnic distance reactions of the members of the workshop. The experimental group was selected from the graduate students at the University of Southern California in 1948. One of the hypothesis of the study, which was based on a pilot experiment conducted in 1947, was that participation in an intercultural workshop for six weeks would result in a measurable decrease in ethnic distance reactions on the part of the members toward ethnic groups. It has been suggested by the study that this experiment needs to be repeated in various parts of the U.S. and with different ethnic groups.

This paper aims to point to some results of a lack of sharing cultural values and some possibilities of sharing cultural values. If one may define democracy as "shared experiences and conclusions democratically arrived at," it is not clear that merely being tolerant of the presence of various cultural groups in American life is not sharing cultural experiences. If present culture is in a growing rather than a finished state, then the future American culture will be rich in so far as Americans now develop an atmosphere in which members of all these groups can share with each other the best of their social values, customs, and folkways. It is obvious that such a condition does not now prevail. The effect of an assumed superiority attitude on the part of the so-called dominant-group members is no less tragic. The term "cultural democracy" well describes this process, a thinking, feeling, and acting together, on a basis of equality. One need to be taking thought as to what some of these values are. There is need for intensive thought and. experimentation on how to share these differences.

A plea is made for the current need to consider carefully exactly what Is meant by the term "rural". It is suggested that, while ambiguity in usage prevails, most understandings involve ecological, occupational, or cultural dimensions in some measure. By taking each of these three broad classes of variables separately as the defining characteristic of "rurality", some of the strengths and weaknesses of each in terms of logic, scientific needs, professional precedents, and the demands from the larger society for pragmatic operation in the discipline are set down. While incomplete, the specification and analysis of the alternative lines of meaning are offered as a step in the necessary direction of clarifying the concept "rural". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Placing an ecological approach in the general framework of American geographic thought indicates the usefulness of distinguishing two trends in the development of this thought-the one ecological, the other spatial. American geography tended to reject the ecological approach because it was identified at an early period with environmental determinism, A spatial, non-functional, approach became dominant. Although the two approaches are two ends of a continuum, and thus connected, they arise from and lead to different sets of questions which involve different approaches and different bodies of theory. The ecological approach may be divided into four imprecise types-biological, human, cultural, and urban-political. The cultural-ecological approach is particularly useful in analyzing obstacles to innovation acceptance in agricultural development because it emphasizes the analysis of existent systems from different viewpoints. Four sets of reality, or viewpoints, can be distinguished in this context-that of the scientist-observer, that of the change-agent, that of the cultivator, and that of the ideal-set of the cultivator. Only when the overlaps and conflicts of these sets are recognized can a realistic appraisal be made. This is only a single instance of the potential of an ecological approach. Spatial theory and ecological theory have not yet been joined. The evident usefulness of both indicates the importance of attempting such a joining, and the futility of arguing for the ascendance of one over the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the lack of data regarding Hispanic immigrants in the United States and presents information on sources to correct that. Up-to-date research information regarding Spanish ethnic group is a problem for social science study. Papers published by the American Ethnological Society has helped correct the lack, specially the 1968 "Proceedings" periodical that addresses Spanish speakers in the country. The drawbacks of carrying out ethnological studies without carefully taken and stratified samples are elucidated. Several examples of research regarding the subject are also presented.

Examines ancient evidences of man in the Southwestern States of the U.S. Assessment of detailed presentation of field data with photographs and artifacts; Evaluation of ordinary requirements of archeological techniques; Detection of cultural changes.

Although the family in some form or other is universal among human societies, the particular form which the family takes is an aspect of the culture of a society. Different cultures are associated with different kinds of family life. Consequently a country such as the U. S. A., which includes diverse cultural groups, will present a variety of types of family life, complicating the task of education for family life by the fact that school children represent this cultural diversity of family life practices and values. The principal cultural sub-groups in the United States, judged by their differences in family-life patterns, are; Ethnic Groups--Italian-American, Polish-American, Japanese-American, Mexican-American, German-American, etc. Religious Groups--Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, Mormon, Mennonite, etc. Social Class Groups--Upper Class, Middle Class, Lower Class. The cultural differences between middle-class and lower-class or working-class families will be discussed in this paper, together with their implications for family life education in the secondary schools. The material cited is only suggestive. There are other cultural differences which are not mentioned here. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses seasonal psychology and the differences in human behavior during each season. The psychoseasonal trend is described for its marking Americans' perceptions of seasonal change. Word association tests are noted. Winter reportedly has the shortest seasonal association, while spring has the longest. People who are exclusively oriented towards one season are described. Deseasonalizing influences are explained. The article describes differing cultural, economic, psychological and social behavior depending on the season or time of year.

The article focuses on the study of the destruction in Indochina after the war conducted by the Stanford Biology Study Group. The report aims to evaluate the extent and seriousness of the said destruction. The people in Southeast Asia whose area has been part of the destruction have been subjected to intense deprivation and sufferings up to this time. Social destruction concerning the ecological damage in Southeast Asia and its effect on people living there is also discussed in the study. It stresses that U.S. policies are destroying the Vietnamese culture and social organization. Long-term effects and aftermath of the said destruction were evaluated in the study.

The article presents the author's discussion about the role of communism in the American democracy. His main objective is to present a thesis showing that the fear of communism may damage the essential part of the American democracy. He mentions the forces within the framework of the American society such as the cultural, political, artistic and intellectual life and their relation to the external environment. He also discusses the effects of these forces in the political and academic community in the United States.

This study compared the perceptions of need satisfaction and importance for blue-collar workers in the USA and Mexico. Organizational and technological differences were controlled to isolate culture as the independent variable. Porter's need questionnaire was used to tap employees' attitudes. The data indicate that there were significant differences in nearly every need item score between the two countries. Mexican workers were more satisfied than their counterparts in the USA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]