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Presents a letter to the editor regarding limitations of personal experience.

After listening to the author's talk for a half-hour on research in the field of child socialization, a freshman raised his hand to comment, "In all of my eighteen years, I never came across any of those things you were talking about." The class laughed, but the author found that other students are also unwilling to believe anything that they cannot confirm by their own experience. It does no good to point out that they get to meet in a lifetime only an insignificant proportion of the human race and that. moreover, a white Protestant New Yorker has little chance of knowing Southern Negroes, European priests, or even American farmers. Personal experience is so convincing that they discourse with assurance on topics about which the author dares to make only the most tentative observations. At first the author was non-plussed. Then he got an idea. If he could shake their confidence in the validity of personal experience, perhaps they would prefer the cautious, pedestrian conclusions of social science. Over the years one can accumulate quite a bit of experience testifying that public transportation companies are engaged in a conspiracy to frustrate your travel plans. Of course, it is neither the bus company nor a malevolent deity. One observes the comings and goings of buses while waiting for one and this biases your conclusions. When buses go by in the wrong direction, one may fume, curse the bus company, or spend one's time counting them. But no matter how many there are, one does not board any of them.

Presents a letter to the editor on crime and social structure, published in the February 1950 issue of the journal "American Sociological Review."

Presents letters to the editor referencing articles and topics discussed in previous issues. Essence of teaching and learning; Research on the role of content knowledge in reading comprehension; Importance of knowledge-rich curriculum to develop reading comprehension.

A letter to the editor is presented in response to the review symposium on "Rampage : The Social Roots of School Shootings."

The article presents information on the book "The Effectiveness of a Prison and Parole System," by Daniel Glaser. It provides the most ambitious investigation of a large correctional system. It presents repeated interviews with sample of inmates from five different correctional institutions. About fifty inmates from each institution were interviewed individually during their first week in the institution, responding to a common schedule of questions. They were reinterviewed at the end of four months of incarceration and again after six months. One of the objectives of the research was to discover whether there were systematic differences in inmate attitudes depending on the type of prison and extent of the prisoners' exposure to its culture. Ideally, Glaser and his colleagues would have continued reinterviewing these same individuals in prison until their release and then would have followed them up in their home communities. This procedure would have illuminated the relationship between prison experiences and community adjustment, for example employment problems. But an extensive panel design was not feasible, not only because of cost but also because the field work would have taken years longer. The Glaser's monograph brings together an enormous amount of information concerning the impact of the prison experience and of the problem of re-entry into the free community.

Presents a letter to the editor on the article "Delinquent Boys: The Culture of the Gang," by John I. Kitsuse and David C. Dietrick published in the April 1959 issue of the American Sociological Review.