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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]

This article reports findings from a survey of drinking habits and attitudes of 1,185 persons, chosen to represent the adult population of Iowa. The major purpose of this study is to report the results of a search for clues to explain sociocultural variations in "alcoholic drinking behavior." The phenomena analyzed in this study are statements the person makes about his own use of beverage alcohol. The pertinent categories of phenomena are respondents' reports of (1) drinking vs. abstaining, (2) heavy drinking, (3) extreme deviant drinking and (4) definitions of alcohol in terms of what liquor (including all alcoholic beverages) does for the individual. In this study evidence was offered that the 35 drinkers who were distinguished from the sample manifest the kind of deviant drinking behavior which renders them likely candidates for the label "alcoholic." This study revealed that there is no necessary or invariant relationship between rates of drinkers, rates of heavy drinkers, and rates of alcoholic drinkers, and rates of alcoholic drinkers for the several social segments of the Iowa population.