Edward A. Suchman

An Analysis of the Validity of Health Questionnaires

to both demands of role and self and level of information. No attempt has been made in this report to show how a sociological conception of field work roles can do more than provide lines of thought and action for dealing with problems and processes of field interaction. Obviously, however, a theory of role and self growing out of study of field interaction is in no sense limited to that area of human activity. Learning to take and play roles, although dramatized in the field, is essentially the same kind of social learning people engage in throughout life. In any case, the foregoing discussion has suggested that a field worker selects and plays a role so that he, being who he is, can best study those aspects of society in which he is interested.

Attitudes Toward the Korean War

In the study described here, the authors inanother and show how such conflicts affect vestigate the complex relationship between student attitudes toward the role which the three dimensions of political opinion: ideoUnited States has been playing in Korea and logical conviction, partisan allegiance, and toward their willingness to serve there. political knowledge. They find these three sets The authors are all in the Department of of criteria are sometimes in conflict with one Sociology at Cornell University.

The Logic of Scale Construction

MosT of the classifications used in the course of our daily communication with one another are not defined with any great exactitude. For ordinary purposes of communication, it is usually not necessary to formulate a set of rules to distinguish between those things which belong to a certain class and those which do not. Agreement as to what constitutes membership in a class of objects is common enough to permit understanding without resort to explicit classification schemes. People can talk and write about &dquo;beautiful women,&dquo; &dquo;successful men,&dquo; &dquo;good books&dquo; or &dquo;prosperous nations&dquo; without bothering to state the rules for their classifications. These &dquo;loose&dquo; classifications con-

Student Reaction to Impending Military Service

and technical conditions where land cannot hold permanent value, and even here there appears to be a tendency toward bringing land to an important place wherever conditions permit. Our proposition is not proved but is promising: there is a requisite functional relationship between land as a value symbol and the character of the economy-negative in the case of hunting-gathering peoples and positive in the case of folk or peasant communities. And if there is such a functional relationship here, it suggests that there is a more general nexus between the definition of arete and the character of economic life. This paper has been directed to two purposes. First, and more broadly, an attempt has been made to show the two ways in which social anthropology should contribute to the development of general sociological theory. These are the establishment of (1) general social imperatives, and (2) requisite functional relationships between certain cultural forms in different departments of social life. To fulfill this broad purpose, empirically based examples were offered. The first serves to demonstrate that societies universally establish certain behavioral forms as particularly valued, that such behavior is associated with culturally desirable social position and is represented symbolically to fellow members by desired honors, possessions, or privileges. This arete is viewed as a necessary element-a general social imperative-for the maintenance of a society. The second example has endeavored to show that the specific form that arete takes in any single culture is related to other aspects of culture, in what we may call a requisite functional relationship, and the paper has illustrated this point by relating value symbols to forms of economic organizations. These illustrations constitute the second purpose; namely, the introduction of substantive theoretical analysis through the comparative examination of cultural systems.