John C. McKinney

The Contribution of George H. Mead to the Sociology of Knowledge

can obscure the fact that there may be referents whose importance he does not perceive or cannot verbalize. Moreover, efforts aimed solely at making qualitative distinctions between groups, i.e., is a particular group a referent or not, may result in the failure to recognize that the task is often not to determine which of several groups is important but to index their relative influence. Techniques which will provide both objective and subjective data that permit this type of precision specification are needed. The problem is, of course, more than a technical one. Since research is intimately related to theory, further development of reference group theory, particularly as it deals with that complex process in which the individual resolves the conflicting expectations of his membership groups, would considerably simplify the task of delineating and quantifying referents.