Ruth Shonle Cavan

Topical Summaries of Current Literature: Interviewing for Life-History Material

The interview, as a method of obtaining life-history material, stands midway between the uncontrolled diary or autobiography and the formal rating scale or test. Interviewing varies according to the purpose for which data are sought and according to the philosophy of the interviewer: thus the psychoanalyst seeks different information from than sought by the sociologist. A survey of methods used by numerous investigators shows that there is considerable uniformity in the practice of holding interviews in private, in a quiet place, preferably an office. There is a great variety of opinion concerning desirable qualities and attitudes of a good interviewer: respect for the interviewee, helpfulness, non-critical, impersonal, and sympathetic attitudes are most frequently mentioned. Methods of handling the interview include techniques for controlling the interview, the comfort of the interviewee, making friendly contacts, giving the interviewee confidence, securing spontaneous response, and so on. Printed schedules may be found for complete life-histories and for securing life-history material on special types of experiences. On some phases of life-history investigations little data can be found, notably on methods of analyzing the life-history material after it is obtained.

Is Special Treatment Needed For Elderly Offenders

The recent interest in elderly offenders has spawned issues concerning their treatment. Elderly criminals, who contribute only about 4 percent of the total arrest in the United States, have heretofore been subject to the legal procedures applied to all adult offenders, perhaps tempered locally and informally by a certain amount of leniency on the part of police or judges. With the new focus on elderly offenders, has the time come for a general policy on treatment of these offenders, different from that meted out to adult offenders of all ages?

CONCEPTS AND TERMINOLOGY IN INTERRELIGIOUS MARRIAGE

I NTRODUCTION. Interreligious marriage has been a matter of concern to religious leaders seemingly since the origin of different religions. Rules and their modification, polemics, and, much more recently, research have kept the subject alive. Research of any kind rests on conceptualization and precision of terminology; theories may follow later. Research on interreligious marriage has scarcely gone beyond limited surveys of rates of intermarriage; discussions tend to be partisan in nature by proponents of one religion or another. These approaches are more or less at a standstill; little that is new is being uncovered. The time is at hand for placing interreligious marriage in a conceptual framework and for developing greater precision in terminology, both for the sake of clarity and to break away from some of the inadequacies of present research. This article makes a start in that direction. It is not intended to be global; except for occasional illustrations, it is limited to the United States.

A Dating-Marriage Scale of Religious Social Distance

horizontal social distance are conceptualized to show that both are feasible concepts in relation to religion. A scale, based on work by Prince (1956), ranges from complete rejection of other religions (would neither date nor marry) through various conditions making marriage feasible, to assimilation through conversion into another religion to make marriage possible. The scale was used with Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant university students. The results are analyzed in the light of historical and current policies and experiences to demonstrate the validity of the scale. Choice of dating partners reflected the attitudes shown on the social distance scale. When choices outside the students own religion were distributed according to the social distance scale they tended to be selected by students at the tolerant or low social distance end of the scale, showing some consistency between attitudes and behavior.

Jewish Student Attitudes Toward Interreligious and Intra-Jewish Marriage

A classification of Jewish university students into Reform and Conservative showed a marked difference in their attitudes toward interfaith and intra-Jewish marriage. Reform Jews were more willing to make interfaith marriages than were Conservative Jews. Students of both branches were more reluctant to marry Catholics than Protestants,and both were more willing to marry persons of no faith than either Catholics or Protestants. In intra-Jewish marriages, attitudes showed that Reform Jews were more willing to marry Conservative than Orthodox Jews, whereas Conservative Jews were more willing to marry Orthodox than Reform Jews. Interpretations are suggested.

Family Life and Family Substitutes in Old Age

A THOUGH adults typically live in the marital status in private households, at all ages a few people deviate from this pattern, living in institutions, with relatives, or in rooming houses or hotels. With old age the proportion of deviant arrangements increases. Table I shows the decrease with age in percentage of independent households and the corresponding increase in other living arrangements. Much of the personal and social adjust-

The Wish Never to Have Been Born

Although juvenile suicides in the United States are negligible, the wish never to have been born occurred to about 30 per cent of a widely scattered sample of adolescent boys and girls. This wish occurred most frequently among children with high scores (poor adjustment) on a test of neurotic traits and also among those rated by their teachers as poorly adjusted socially, emotionally, and on conventional moral traits. It also occurred most frequently among children from homes which lacked harmony and intimacy between parents and children. Social contacts were less closely associated with the wish than were home conditions. The wish never to have been born, which may be considered as an evasive attempt at adjustment, indicates both a poorly adjusted personality in the child and lack of unity and harmony in the home.

Public and Private Areas and the Survival of Communal Subsocieties

An ongoing process in America has been the growing engulfment of small rural communities by the larger or dominant society, whereby the small community loses its rural characteristics and accepts mainstream American ways (Warren, 1973: 53-56). The members of one type of community, however, wish to remain separate and different; they resist the impact of the dominant society. This type includes small religiously oriented communities, such as the Hutterites, the Bruderhof, Amana, and Old Order Amish. These are small subsocieties with unique lifestyles that are impossible for members to follow in the midst of a larger society. Therefore, the members withdraw, establish boundaries, and limit contacts with the dominant society. Their desire to isolate themselves

From Social Movement to Organized Society: the Case of the Anabaptists

ist orientation, only to collapse in a few years. In contrast, still thriving in the United States are three religious subsocieties with numerous residential communities that originated in Europe in the Anabaptist movement of the sixteenth century, survived severe persecution, solidified their organization there, and later migrated to the United States, where they continue to flourish as distinct subsocieties, namely, Amish, Hutterites, and Mennonites. The

The Relation of Home Background and Social Relations to Personality Adjustment

Two scales have been constructed to measure the home background and the social relationships of adolescents in terms of their tendency to produce well-adjusted personalities. The device for classifying children as to emotional and social adjustment was a brief personality test of the neurotic inventory type. A schedule was developed containing questions on the home and on social relationships which differentiated the well-adjusted from the maladjusted children. Values were assigned to the various possible answers to the questions and the sum of these values gave two scores for each child, one indicating the type of home background, the other the type of social relationships. The reliability and validity of the scales have been established by approved methods.