Ronald Taft

The Role of Personality Traits in the Social Assimilation of Immigrants

IMMIGRANTS vary markedly in the degree to which they become socially, culturally, and emotionally integrated with their new country in any given period of time. This variation is attributable to many factors; some intrinsic to the immigrant himself, such as age, occupation, or motivation; some extrinsic, that is, arising from his circumstances in his new country, for example, his success in gaining suitable housing and employment, or the type of wife he marries; and some from interactions between the intrinsic and extrinsic factors, such as cultural distance between the two relevant nationalities, or the degree of prejudice in the host

The Current Status of Former Jewish Refugees in Melbourne

came to Australia during this period were refugees from Nazism and from the aftermath of World War II. It is possible to distinguish three distinct groups of Jewish refugees, each of which arrived during a different part of this period. These groups differ, not only in their length of residence here, but also in overall numbers, national origins, religious, educational, and economic backgrounds. The first group consists of those Jews who arrived in Australia between 1936 and 1939, mainly of German, Austrian, and Czech nationality. Most were fleeing from the discriminatory persecution, economic, social and physical, instigated by the Nazi regimes in these countries. Gaining permission to enter Australia was not

Explorations in the evaluation and recognition of self using direct and disguised methods of presentation

Seventy-six male naval recruits judged the attractiveness of photographs of peers relative to their own attractiveness. Subsequently they judged photographs of two strangers which were fused stereoscopically into a composite, and also a photograph of themselves similarly fused with that of a stranger. In the direct judgments the Ss rated the strangers as less attractive than themselves, but in the judgments of the composites those Ss who fully recognized themselves rated the strangers as more attractive than the composites that included themselves. No evidence was found for either more favourable or more extreme ratings of the composite photographs in which the Ss only partially recognized themselves.

Applied social psychology, ecological studies of immigrant assimilation, and scientific psychology1

Despite exhortations to carry out research on significant social problems, Australian psychologists have not responded with enthusiasm. This reluctance arises partly from the problems of combining useful ecological research with scientific psychology. This problem is discussed in relation to the methodological issues involved and the problem of making a clear-cut conceptual analysis of social data. Special attention is paid to the use that can be made of (1) factor analysis in defining the basic dimensions of the data and (2) typologies as a means of ordering the data to enable general principles to be hypothesized and tested. While the need for intuition is readily admitted, progress in ecological studies also demands sophisticated statistical techniques for handling large masses of data. The argument of the paper is illustrated by material from the studies on the assimilation of immigrants at the University of Western Australia.