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The essence of freedom consists in the absence of restraint and an election or any other concrete instance of choosing is generally deemed to have been free if each voter had an unrestricted choice between several alternatives, of which not casting a vote may have been one. This approach is objective because it is based on "post factum" data reflecting actual behaviour in a given situation and it is statistical in so far as the analysis embraces the decisions taken by the full membership of the selected group. But diversity alone does not necessarily indicate the absence of restraint, because variety can be enforced just as effectively as uniformity. If, for example, the actual statistical spread of the choices can be traced back to the definite orders of an authority, the actual freedom displaced is nil. There are also instances where, though the factor itself is unavoidable, its consequences are not. Take sex, for instance, as a determinant of choice of profession. Whereas it is hardly a practical proposition to alter the sex of a girl who wants to pursue a profession at present reserved to males, it would not be impossible to throw all professions open to both sexes.

In this paper the mean intelligence quotients of 11-year-old children living in rural areas have been compared with those of children in urban areas. Comparisons were made, first between different types of area within the same county and secondly between rural areas as a whole and different types of urban areas. All comparisons showed that the rural school children obtained lower scores than urban children, and that the spread in intelligence among them was also smaller. Girls recorded higher scores than boys; their 'superiority' increased with the fall in the concentration of population. However, although the superiority of urban children is statistically significant, the difference is so small as to have little practical importance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A brief description is given of a population sample of the County Borough of Dudley in which households were sampled with probabilities proportional to the number of adults in the household. 2. The variance of estimates for specific age-sex groups is considered and an empirical regression obtained relating the coefficient of variation to the size of the group. 3. Estimates are given of the variance that would result from a number of alternative schemes of sampling and estimation. 4. The possibility of increased, precision by district stratification is examined and shown to be negligible. 5. The variance to be expected in the age-sex tabulations from the I % sample of the 1951 Population Census is estimated from the results of the previous analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though it would seem of obvious importance to understand the relationship between occupation and the decision to marry, there is astonishingly little published directly on this subject. Most of what there is relates to the age of the female, primarily because the interest in gathering such information has tended to center around the demographic study of fertility. An attempt is made to supplement the picture derived from these sources by materials emerging from my own research. As this research is in a very early, exploratory stage, the data that the article presents, on young British engineers, is very tentative and preliminary in nature. Given the differentiation and specialization of occupations within Western society, and the differences of life situation associated with the various occupational roles, one would expect sharp differences in the age of first marriage for males. Furthermore, one would expect these tendencies to have been growing increasingly over the past hundred years, as the degree of specialization has increased.

The major purpose in this article, according to the author is to report on the range of areas covered by the responses to self-evaluation test, and of course to make a report on whatever is presently available regarding differences in this range by several social categories. In order to provide information of a systematic and inclusive sort, more than two hundred student protocols were content-analyzed by the method of successive combination into more general categories. It was found that locus increased with age; that within the age bracket represented by groups, sex references increased with age. Result indicated that females more frequently and saliently than males identified themselves by sex and kin and less frequently by race than did males. Occupational identity increased with years of professional training, and, within one professional school, nursing, and locus scores increased with years of training. Finally, an over-all content analysis of responses from students in four professional schools and from members of one professional group indicated marked differences in social anchorage, reference to ideology, identity in terms of intention or ambition, and the amount and nature of self-evaluations.

The article describes fertility trends among Soviet women during the past 40 years as compared to American women during the same period of time. Period-specific fertility rates were arrived at by relating the annual total of live births to a pattern of age-specific fertility rates estimated for each year and also to the number of women for each single year of age. These rates were then appropriately re-arranged and compressed into five-year age groups to form a series of cohort-specific fertility rates. The findings rest on somewhat conjectural estimates of live births and numbers of women in the Soviet Union, some of which were originally prepared before the 1959 Soviet census. The tentative evidence shows that changes in the period-specific fertility of Soviet women were far more irregular and dramatic in the past, than among American women. According to the author, this experimental investigation of fertility in the Soviet Union makes no claim to high standards of accuracy and validity. Its intended purpose is to stress the desirability of shifting emphasis from the temporal and prognostic type of study, characteristic of present-day demographic research about the Soviet Union, to the generational and historical approach.

Birth data obtained from the parish records of the City of York, England show a markedly bi-modal seasonal distribution in the sixteenth century. It appeared interesting to compare the expectation of life of individuals born during this period, during the two minimal and two maximal seasons, to determine if there was any adaptive significance in the annual variation of birth rate. No such effect could be established by this study. However, certain conclusions of considerable interest can be drawn. The survivorship functions for either sex, grouped by birth season or on the whole group, are of a rectilinear diagonal type more reminiscent of an avian population rather than man. However the York data were treated, no statistically significant difference appeared between the sexes when their expectation of life was compared, and the female death rate at all times until the end of life was somewhat higher than the male. It appeared that sixteenth-century York tended to care better for their sons than for their daughters, which also appears to be the case in some modern societies of low to moderate living standard.

Age data from the 1960 and earlier censuses of Ghana allow the construction of child-woman ratios, which appear to indicate the existence of a substantial urban-rural fertility differential. Plausible assumptions of urban-rural mortality differentials increase the apparent fertility differential. In this article recently published data for Statistical Areas in the country's larger towns are used to demonstrate that one explanation for the fertility differential is almost certainly the enumeration of some females in the towns, while one or more of their surviving children were enumerated outside. Nevertheless, in 1960 the four largest towns exhibited birth levels, which are likely to have been about 11 percent below those of the population in the surrounding regions. Roughly half the differential can be attributed to a general urban-rural differential and half to socio-economic differentials within the towns. This article argues that the fertility differentials are evidence of some fertility decline among key groups in the population and that such declines are likely to become more widespread.