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The article discusses the study of mental deficiency as a branch of mental medicine. Many regard the field to be of minor importance but it is actually a difficult one. It implies a wide understanding of psychology, neuropathology, sociology and genetics. The training, understanding and care of the high grade cases is a part of the major problem of constructing a sound democratic civilized community, in which every healthy citizen can play a useful part.

Ordinarily an anniversary occasions the reification of an artificial period. In this case however, there is a certain juncture in the history of the point of view which makes of the past quarter-century something worthy of consideration for symbolic interactionism as well as for our celebration of the founding of the Midwest Sociological Society. The year 1937 lies virtually in the middle of a four-year period which saw the publication of Mind, Self, and Society, Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century, and The Philosophy of the Act. It would represent the greatest naiveté to suggest that thus the year 1937 represented the introduction of symbolic interactionism. We are all aware of the long development: from James, Baldwin, and Cooley to Thomas, Faris, Dewey, Blumer, and Young. Even the Tardean imitation and suggestion which underlay Ross's Social Psychology contributed a good deal ordinarily not credited to him in the development of interaction theory. Nor is it the fact that Mead represents the fullest development of the orientation that makes so significant the posthumous publication of his works (for which we may conveniently take 1937 as an anchoring point). Mead's ideas had been known for a very long time. He had taught University of Chicago students from 1893 to 1931. His notions were bruited about in classes and seminars wherever there were professors conducting them who had studied at the University of Chicago—not least in the great heartland included in the Mid-west of our Society. Some of Mead's students had published their versions of his ideas or quotations from some of his philosophical papers—Kimbali Young's Source Book in Social Psychology of a decade earlier contained a paper by Mead, and his Social Psychology bore the strong imprint of Meadian interactionism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper has suggested the need to reexamine die value-stance of sociology. In adopting the ideology of science, it eschewed experimentation as a basic methodological device. Yet, this paper has also suggested that there is a tendency to confuse the extra-scientific values and norms of science with the scientific method. Thus, the greatest danger to scientific objectivity may not lie so much in sociological experimentation as the inability of the sociologist to separate scientific from value decision-making. Value decisions, undiscriminated and rooted in the ideology of pure science, can be as inhibiting to the effective use of the scientific method in expanding the boundaries of knowledge as any other institutionalized norms. The paper also sugegsted that experimentation had much to oiler sociology. But in failing to imitate the physical sciences in this regard, it may have sacrificed a tool important to its development. A possible means of reconciling ideological and methodological differences over this issue might lie in the development of systematic methods by which to examine the values as well as the methodology which underlie any research effort. The investigator could review the values implicit in his research in much the same way as he now reviews the steps involved in his application of the scientific method. Much could be learned. Human intellectual experience suggests that we proceed more efficiently when the grounds for our behavior are set down, cares fully reviewed, and criticized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents developments in the fields related to psychology and sociology. The annual meeting of the Midwest Sociological Society will be held in Madison on April 15-17, 1954, at the Loraine Hotel. The sectional program will be built around contributed papers. The sections which are tentatively scheduled are the following: Social Disorganization and Crime; Social Psychology; Research Methodology; Marriage and the Family; The Community; Social Structure; The Teaching of Sociology; Population and Human Ecology; and Race and Ethnic Relations. Robert Cuba Jones, from the United Nations, has gone to Mexico to engage in the private practice of technical assistance in the economic and social field. The American Society of Group Psychotherapy and Psychodrama announces an award to be granted in the year 1953-1954 for the best paper dealing with research, theory, or experience, in or pertinent to Group Psychotherapy and Psychodrama. Announcement has been made of the election of Meyer F. Nimkoff as Editor, and of James H.S. Bossard as Chairman of the Editorial Board of Marriage and Family Living, official journal of the National Council on Family Relations.

The article presents a study of relationships among the Protestants and Catholics in the U.S. There is a current impression that this relationship is shifting in the direction of conflict. Bases for such impression is a best-seller book potraying the Catholic hierarchy as a threat to American freedom. This paper attempts to discover what empirical evidence exists to warrant such impression, if tensions do exists then in which area they are strongest and what factors appear to underlie such tensions. The term protestant in this paper refers to persons who are members of those religious bodies such as Episcopalian and Methodist. Catholics include members of the body known officially as the Roman Catholic Church. The term tension is of psychological origin and refers to degree of disharmony.

As the name suggests, social-psychology is a bastard field. It consists of such a variety of peoples doing so many different things in different ways, that it defies definition—at least for me. In spite of the neat delineations which are made in textbooks and the scholarly historical treatments which appear in encyclopediae and symposia, I find it difficult to grasp a concept of "social-psychology" which is anything more than the operational definition: "Social psychology is what people who call themselves social-psychologists, do." That is not much help, but it is all we have got. I mention my own confusion in this matter, not with the aim of confusing others, but by way of explanation: some of the issues I will touch upon in this paper may infringe upon what readers consider to be other areas of sociology. I regret such territorial invasions. But in my own quest for understanding why people act as they do, I have increasingly found that the traditional "fields" in the discipline and the traditional courses in the catalogue do not provide appropriate categories with which I can explain to colleagues and students what it is I am discovering. Having said all of this, let us get down to business. It is a decade since Dennis Wrong published the paper in which he challenged "The oversocialized conception of man in modern society" (1961). Reacting to a determinism which pervaded the social sciences and which seemed to be seeping into popular currency, Wrong asked if man were in fact as constrained by a monolithic culture as we social scientists would have it. A few years later Harold Garfinkel referred more bluntly to the models of men constructed by the various social sciences: he called them "judgmental dopes." The cultural dope and the psychological dope are, respectively, the man in the sociologist's society and the man in the psychologist's society (1967:67-68). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to outline and examine a few basic functions which ideology performs for the individual and for society. In order to progress in this direction, it might help to agree on some basic conceptual definitions. To begin with, some effort must be made to arrive at a satisfactory definition of ideology, since that term occupies a rather central place in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Symbolic interaction theory as derived mainly from the work of George Herbert Mead views the self-concept as a structure of attitudes which arises in social experience and organizes the individual's perception of his social milieu. Recently, tests based upon this symbolic interaction orientation have been developed for the elicitation of self attitudes. One such test frequently used is the Twenty Statements Test (TST) constructed by Manford Kuhn and Thomas McPartland. The TST attempts to ascertain the specific statements respondents use to identify themselves to themselves. The applicability of the TST to problems of self theory is indicated by the rather wide use which has been made of the instrument. Investigations using the TST have focused upon the following: self-concept and social position; a self-concept and behavior; and the self-concept and attitudes toward other social objects. While TST results have been of substantive interest, little attention has been given to the methodological issues involved in the instrument and its use. For example, little is known concerning the validity and reliability of the test and its scoring procedures. If substantive assertions based upon TST results are to be considered as sound, judicious concern should be directed toward basic methodological issues. It is the purpose of this paper to consider empirically one methodological aspect of the TST. The focus is upon the test format itself. The question is posed: Do variations in the TST format produce variations in individuals' response patterns? Specifically, does the length of the test influence the number and the nature of statements made by respondents? This paper is directed toward answering this question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents some questions for the attention of medical sociologists. Some medical educators, admittedly few, still subscribe to the view that they alone are competent to provide role models for medical students and that, therefore, no matter what the subject, the proper training of the physician requires that a physician teach it. Others, adopting a less extreme standpoint, appear to be prepared to accept the behavioral sciences on trust as it were, even while retaining some of these reservations and often questioning the relevance of sociological theory and method to the practical problems of health and illness. While there are then a few medical educators with reservations, it appears that the vast majority nowadays consider that sociology, psychology and anthropology, and perhaps other allied disciplines, have an acknowledged place somewhere in the medical curriculum. It is not proposed in this paper to enter into the general debate on whether the behavioral sciences have anything to contribute to medicine and should be incorporated into medical training.

The article presents a study that aimed to ascertain statistically significant correlated of the trait of "conservatism-radicalism" from a list of pencil and paper items. The 409 subjects used for this study were practically all volunteers. Each of the 409 subjects in this study was given a score on these conservatism-radicalism items. The 100 making the highest scores and 100 making the lowest scores on this test were selected for this contrast study. The initial take-off for this study was a test for "conservatism-radicalism" developed by the Character Research Institute of St. Louis. This test was included in the Youth Expressionaire. The percentage reaction of each group to each of 2,600 items of the total test was ascertained and notations made where differences between the two groups were statistically important. From the study, it seemed that "conservatives" differ from "radicals" on a very large number of specific symptoms from a wide number of fields.

Research conducted during the last few years has investigated the relationship between these personality variables and several dependent variables including performance on classroom tests, preference for certain degrees of risk, estimation of future success, persistence at tasks, and several others. The extent of these findings has seemed substantial enough to warrant the use of achievement-motivation variables as predictors of performance in applied as well as laboratory studies. This is not to imply that the reported findings are always consistent or that significant differences are always discovered. Since the theory of achievement motivation does appear to be of considerable potential use in several areas, any attempt at clarification would seem to be a contribution in a practical as well as a theoretical sense. In this paper one such attempt will be reviewed and data will be presented that seem to clarify some of the inconsistencies in the literature. In particular, control-of-reinforcement theory, originally devised by Julian Rotter, will be reviewed and an attempt will be made to show how a consideration of this theory along with the theory of achievement motivation can aid in understanding the conditions under which both theories apply.

The present paper attempts a fresh evaluation of the psychoanalytic approach to the study of war. Man's increased rationality in his technology has not been matched by an increase of rationality in his social relations has become a depressing cliche. It has for some time been apparent that psychoanalysis, as the discipline most concerned with man's irrationality, might provide some explanations. Unfortunately, psychoanalysts who have attacked the problem have tended toward a narrow parochialism and extremism, assigning exclusive responsibility to one or two mechanisms and ignoring or rejecting the contributions of other sciences. For psychoanalytic theory to have any relevance to the causes of war, several conditions must obtain namely, it must postulate motives which might be satisfied by war, it must demonstrate that these motives do indeed become engaged in the cognitive idea of war, the institutional structure of the society must be such as to allow for the politically effective implementation of these attitudes.

Some years ago the author rejected out of hand a sociologist colleague's argument that the use of analogies or models is characteristic of insecure individuals operating in immature disciplines. This paper essays an explanation that justifies a reversal of judgment concerning the utility of analogies in sociology and social psychology. It is well to recognize, before continuing with the case against analogical analysis of sociological data, that only an extremist would argue that the very persistence of a conceptual scheme is an argument for its functional nature. The reality of these rewards makes it difficult for those employing an analogy to discern whether it has actual heuristic pedagogical value or its continued use is merely a function of rationalization designed to preserve these subjective rewards. Although not unknown in earlier periods of time, mechanistic models or analogies became much more prevalent in the seventeenth century in response to the remarkable gains of the period in mechanics, physics, and mathematics.

In this paper a general social-psychological model has been presented, which is believed to be useful in sociological theory. It was shown that some existing models can be expressed as special cases of this scheme. Also that some empirical data can be interpreted within its framework. It is hoped that if a considerable number of existing models are expressed within the same frame of reference some clues will be offered in the formulation of less abstract, more realistic models. The formulation of empirical evidence within the same frame of reference should provide additional valuable guidance in the search for reliable and realistic sociological theories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the effects of different degrees of knowledge of an audience on the content of communication. The experiment reported in this paper grows out of those reviewed above with one exception. The author has attempted to study perception as one step in the general process of communication and not as an isolated problem. The experiment concluded that the content of a communication is affected by the degree of knowledge which the communicator has of his audience. However, these effects seem to be minimal. It was found that the change of one word in briefing a subject does not seem to usually alter the content of his communication significantly. The major variables affecting the content of a communication are: (a) the nature of the communicator (b) the nature of the objects to be communicated (c) the nature of the audience (d) the degree of briefing about the audience. The method used in this experiment offers a way to measure these variables and to predict the relationships among them for a specific situation.

Birth order (ordinal position) in the nuclear family has been found to be related to a large number of social and psychological factors. Yet the reasons why are not clear. The literature on birth order reflects considerable theoretical confusion. It appears that researchers often discover the significance of birth order accidentally while engaged in other research. As a result their theorizing tends to be frost hoc and to have a disconnected character. There is a need for some system which will aid in the evaluation of existing research findings, and indicate strategic areas for future research. Such a system is introduced, along with some suggestions for research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will address itself to the problem of law as a means of social control. More specifically the question is: To what extent can divorce law be used to prevent defacto family breakup, that is, the situation where marital partners are separated formally or informally. This paper will not concern itself with an equally relevant problem: Is breakup good or bad? If law is to act on human behavior, it should provide an environment which will enable the deviant or potential deviant to internalize the values embodied in the law or it should provide an environment which will force the deviant to conform by systematically placing blocks in his achievement of his deviant values, whenever he violates the law. In searching for environments both social and psychological which lead to breakup one is confronted by an impressive number of items which have been related to breakup. Though the list is long it is thought that all of these factors actually act upon the family members in one of four ways. These have been called defacto breakup by conflict, de facto breakup by indifference, de facto breakup by opportunity, and continuance by fiat.

The effort to establish the theory of technicways has involved the postulation of several differences between these ways of adjustment to technology and the traditional Sumnerian folkways and mores. The purpose of this paper is to elaborate one of these postulates, namely, that folkways and technicways differ with respect to their controlling power. Specifically, the present investigation concerns the mode and relative strength of the controlling force exercised over individuals by the folkways and the technicways. Wherever possible an attempt is made to establish a junction or correspondence of psychological and sociological factors in the control process. The psychological implications of social factors discussed here are perhaps only superficially explored. Indeed, in several places, the analysis penetrates little beyond the social level. The psychoanalytic approach is followed because of the many insights into social phenomena which it affords but chiefly because it offers a structure of personality compatible with social-cultural categories.

On November 7, 1942, the Soviet Union celebrated the first quarter of a century of its existence. In its present gigantic struggle for its own preservation and for the maintenance of freedom and decency in the world, the Soviet Government depends greatly on its present generation, those born or grown up since 1917. The Soviet Government is now thus reaping the harvest of its investment in the care, training, and general bringing up of the generation in the years gone by. The purpose of this paper is to review briefly the highlights in the Soviet child-care program in the last twenty-five years. Such a review, of necessity sketchy and general, is hereby presented not only by way of a better understanding of the Russian ally, but also to throw some light on the problem of child care in these crucial times. In 1914 in the whole vast Russian Empire, with a population of about 170 million, there were altogether 7,000 maternity beds available to the public. Total accommodations for nursery children was 500. At the outbreak of World War I, there were less than 8 million children attending the primary and secondary schools in that country. During the same period the attendance at the higher educational institutions was slightly over a hundred thousand.

The importance of early parent-child relational patterns for subsequent husband-wife relationship in marriage has been generally accepted in the fields of psychoanalysis, psychology and sociology. In studying the dominant, equalitarian and submissive roles of husband and wife in marriage, the influence of early affectional interaction to parents, therefore, will be taken into consideration. While different disciplines may have different conceptual systems in regard to the relation between early interactions and later marital roles, it seems to be of interest to find out statistically such association in a group of 589 married couples.' This paper will report the results of an investigation on the relation between young couple's conflict-attachment relationship with their own parents before marriage on the one hand, and their dominant-equalitarian-submissive role in marriage on the other. It is assumed that positive associations exist between "presence of conflict" with parents and the dominant role, and between "absence of conflict but presence of attachment" to parents and the equalitarian role in marriage.

The purpose of this paper, then, is to bring organizational analysis to bear upon the problem of competition for control over goals, means, and organizationally relevant behavior. Further, emphasis is placed upon one type of strategy by which such competition has been managed, i.e., formal coaptation (See Selznick, 1949) and, additionally, some consequences of that strategy. The unit for analysis is the Christian Family Movement (CFM), a Midwest based, lay apostolic, action organization whose leaders claim the allegiance of some 60,000 married couples in fifty-five countries. For some time now CFM has been experiencing the pains of organizational transition, and its history reflects the consequences of two groups in competition for control over the organization's goals and means. One consequence is somewhat of a two-dimensional authority structure, each dimension of which is felt to be the only legitimate one from the standpoint of its representatives. Other consequences have to do with policy-development and the achievement of formally stated goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of questions have been recently raised or re-raised with respect to the status and intended function in sociology of the methodological device known as the "type." Martindale's summary of the historical and contemporary uses to which the typology has been put as well as his formulation of the issues connected with such use permits the economy of moving directly into a specification of the problems considered in this paper, and the proposed solutions. The present effort is directed primarily at providing one solution to the often raised problem of "the relation between the idealization involved in the type and the empirical reality," although less pressing issues are also treated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most promising efforts to operationalize the concept of the "self" has been that of the late Professor Manford H. Kuhn and his students. This approach has employed the "Twenty-Statements Test," or TST, an open-ended instrument which is designed to elicit the respondent's "spontaneous" self-definitions in their order of salience. Since its first publication in 1954, the TST has been used in a variety of studies? However, previous studies of the "self" have been conducted on restricted population samples, and little is known about the self-definitions held by a general population. The present paper describes the TST responses of a representative sample of the general adult population of Iowa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The general theory of symbolic interaction, specifically self theory, is focused upon the importance of language as an instrument of definition and communication. People are seen as responding not directly to a resistant outer reality but to meanings of objects which are defined within a cultural system and social organization. G. H. Mead, in his discussion of the way persons develop self concepts and the accompanying ability to take roles effectively, speaks of the degree to which persons develop a "general other." This general other is an organized structure of attitudes believed to be common to all and is defined in terms of a universe of discourse growing out of the symbolic interaction of a community of individuals. Replies to the Twenty Statements Test, described by Kuhn and McPartland, display this quality. Self-identifying statements which people make fall along a rough spectrum of reference which can be broken up in various ways. The distinction which Kuhn and McPartland have reported is between what they call consensual and nonconsensual statements. Consensual statements are defined as those statements which would be generally understood by persons in the larger society without explanation. Nonconsensual statements are defined as those requiring interpretation before their social relevance can be assessed. The consensual statement is language behavior directed to the general other, while the nonconsensual statement is language directed to a more limited audience. H. S. Sullivan's contribution in developing the notion of the "significant other" consists in accounting for the fact that persons often do not seem to internalize standards and norms from the whole society but from segments of it on some selective basis. In this paper, the number of consensual statements made in response to the Twenty Statements Test will be called the locus score. Respondents are assigned to "high" and "low" locus categories as they make more or less than the median number of consensual statements. Expanding upon this frame of reference, it seems reasonable to propose that the locus quality found in self-conceptions of a given person is also characteristic of his conceptions of other objects. This hypothesis is based on the assumption that the self is the core of a set of interrelated attitudes, and that the level of reference employed by the respondent in his attitudes toward the self would therefore be applicable to other attitudes as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The phenomenological approach to the study of human behavior, while not new, is receiving increasing attention in psychology. Perceptual psychology especially has been influenced by phenomenology. Snygg and Combs have been the leading exponents of phenomenology in other fields of psychology. The present paper attempts to present the basic aspects of the phenomenological approach to human behavior. While the approach is perhaps dose to the common sense approach to the study of behavior, and is essentially the method adopted by literary writers, it is nevertheless capable of being applied in the scientific study of behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on sociology in the English novel. Any endeavour to set forth in a few pages the sociological significance of the novel must of necessity yield results of a very meagre and imperfect kind. The title chosen for this paper seemed at first glance to fix a reasonable limit to the subject, whereas in point of fact it implies the throwing of a net over the whole field of modern fiction. The difficulty is not to discover sociology in fiction, but to find anything therein that is without sociological value and meaning. The truth obviously is that in the novel, which is the characteristic art form of modern literature the authors have the most comprehensive presentation of contemporary society but extraordinarily detailed, various and in large measure truthful. The middle period of the nineteenth century witnessed a remarkable development of the English novel. From being merely a narrative of passion, fashion, or adventure, a record of individual character and humours, it became the complex medium for psychological analysis, for ethical theory and discuss and for the description and exposition of social and economic change. The novel of to-day is in a fairly full sense the house of life and its mansions are without number.

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One of the factors which affects an individual's motivation to perform on a group task, as well as his feelings of accomplishment and satisfaction, is the clarity of the social structure within which the individual functions psychologists B.R. Raven and J. Rietsema in a recent experiment were concerned with some effects upon a group member of the clarity of the group's goal and the path to that goal. With a very ingenious method, utilizing a tape recording, they were able to induce two degrees of goal clarity the subject (S) was given the task of cutting out geometrical figures presumably to be used by the other members of his group in constructing some three-dimensional objects. While S was involved in his paper cutting, he was permitted to hear, over a loud speaker, what the others were doing with the pieces he had provided. One half of the Ss were given, through the recorded discussion, a clear picture of the goal the others were working toward and what they were doing to achieve it. The recording heard by the other Ss presented the group task as quite vague and ambiguous.

The article comments on the development of the social sciences in Poland. The organization of periodicals is always linked with the structure of scientific institutions. This also holds true in Poland, and it is therefore useful to sketch the organization structure of the social sciences in order to understand the functioning of periodicals in scientific life. Polish scientific institutions are set up in several departments. The divisions among different institutions and organizational sections shape the character and functions of social science periodicals in Poland. The periodicals published by the universities and the Polish Academy of Sciences are of an academic character, i.e., they deal with theoretical studies, information on the advancement of science, methodological problems, etc. Periodicals issued by ministerial institutes which are subordinate to central institutions deal rather with practical problems, applied research in economics, sociology, psychology, social politics and the like. In turn the periodicals of scientific associations deal more with regional problems. This division is not entirely strict, for a number of periodicals devote part of their space to theoretical problems, a part to practical problems and a part to local matters.