Gerald Gurin

Americans view their mental health

BOOK REVIEWS Americans View Their Mental Health. By Gerald Gurin, Joseph Veroff, and Sheila Feld. Price,

Group Consciousness and Political Participation

7.50. Pp. 444. Basic Books, Inc., 59 Fourth Ave., New York 3, 1960. This is the fourth in the series of ten monographs sponsored by the Joint Commission on Mental Illness and Health and designed to assess the nations mental health resources and needs from a variety of perspectives. Its focus is the subjective dimension of mental health. Although not all of the monographs have been published so far, the findings and the recommendations of each have been already summed up and interpreted in the Commissions final report which, because of the publicity it has received, may be familiar to many readers. The present volume is based on an interview survey conducted in 1957 with nearly twenty-five hundred individuals selected to provide a probability sample of the countrys adult population. It is a product of three social psychologists, all of whom are on the staff of the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan, one of the few widely recognized and influential organizations of its kind in social sciences. Besides being impressive for sheer magnitude and the consistent clarity in the presentation and evaluation of the data, the study gives further testimony of the methodological sophistication and the technical know-how typical of the work produced by the Center. Without committing themselves to a definition of mental health, the investigators explore it through a number of measures of adjustment. The measures, however, all derive from the self-appraised, experiential realm of the respondent. In the area of general life adjustment, such measures are obtained from the information about the extent of worrying, evaluation of personal happiness, whether the respondent ever felt close to a nervous breakdown, and if he ever experienced a problem relevant for professional help. In the more specific areas of functioning, namely, marriage, parenthood, and work, adjustment is studied via consideration of such variables as satisfaction with the particular role, feelings of adequacy in performing it, degree of involvement, expectations about future, and the type of problems and their prevalence encountered in each role. It is worth pointing out that in taking a multiple-criterion approach to mental health, the investigators are implicitly in agreement with the current view (e.g., Jahoda, 1958; Smith, 1961) that the search for a conceptual formulation of mental health which could meet with a general consensus is futile because of the unavoidable valuative assumptions in all such formulations. The organization of the book is as follows : The first part deals mainly with the distribution and the interrelations of the indices of adjustment in different demographic groups, most often specified in terms of such variables as sex, education, and age. (Religion, in-

College Environments, Diversity, and Student Learning

This article explores the theoretical and methodological problems underlying the relationship between group consciousness and political participation with data from the Center for Political Studies (CPS) 1972 and 1976 National Election Studies. It delineates four conceptual components of group consciousness and examines their relationships with electoral and nonelectoral participation among both subordinate and dominant social groups. An interactive model fits both a theory of mobilization and the data far better than a linear, additive model.

Myth and reality: The causes and persistence of poverty

The research literature on students in higher education is both rich and varied, even though the concerns addressed in this literature effectively resolve to three primary questions (Dey and Feldman, 1999): What sorts of people go to college, what experiences do they have at college, and what sorts of people do they become by the end of their college experience? To generate meaningful answers to these primary questions requires not only careful consideration of the attributes of students, but also of the educational environments that they encounter during their journey through the postsecondary education enterprise.

Diversity and Higher Education: Theory and Impact on Educational Outcomes

Policies directed at alleviating poverty rest on a set of assumptions regarding the demographic composition of the poor and the psychological dispositions of poor individuals. Evidence from a long-term study of a representative sample of low-income individuals shows that poverty is very widespread but not usually very persistent, and that the characteristics of the persistently poor do not conform to the conventional wisdom. Furthermore, the economic status of the poor does not appear to have been caused by psychological dispositions. Intergenerational data from the same study show generally weak links between the poverty or welfare status of parents and that of their children. Public policies for dealing with poverty can be properly devised without attempting to resocialize poor people and without undue concern that poverty programs will generate dependency among the majority of those they help.