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There can be no doubt of the prestige possessed by quantitative methods in the minds of social scientists of the present generation. It is the purpose of this article to point the inevitable subjectivism of a certain type of so-called measurement, and to present a partially developed technique for determining the extent of variations among separate investigators who attempt to measure the same material. This technique relates, that is, to the problem of verification, and permits the calculation of a coefficient which will throw some light on the validity of the measurements. As illustrative of the field of inquiry to which the argument relates, researchers have conducted an experiment in the measurement of newspaper content, employing the methods developed by Professor Malcolm M. Willey in his noteworthy study of the country press in Connecticut. He has made every effort to achieve objectivity and he has covered an extensive range of newspaper material. Professor Willey's method is simple in its main outlines. He classifies all printed matter exclusive of advertisements in the papers analyzed, placing each news item in a single category. The system of categories that he has developed contains ten major headings and minor or subcategories into which the content of any newspaper may presumedly be fitted.

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This article is a preliminary analysis of the distribution of schizophrenic and paranoid disorders by socio-economic class in the New Haven, Connecticut, community. The data were assembled by a research team composed of sociologists, psychiatrists, and a clinical psychologist. First, the class structure of the community was delineated by the sociologists; second, they interviewed, as controls, a five per cent sample of the community's population; third, the team took a census of psychiatric patients; fourth, both the sample population and the psychiatric patients were classified into five socio-economic strata. When the data were tabulated it was observed that the 847 schizophrenic patients located by the Psychiatric Census were largely from the lowest stratum. The contribution of each class or stratum to the patient population was measured by an Index of Current Prevalence, in which a distribution of patients proportionate to the community's population would produce an index for each class of 100. The possible effects of geographic and social mobility on schizophrenia were revealed by the finding that schizophrenics, upon first admission to a mental hospital, come principally from the most deteriorated ecological areas of cities.

This is a preliminary report on relationships between changes in life events and changes in psychiatric symptomatology in a community sample of 720 adults in New Haven, Connecticut. Over a two-year period it was found that the greater the net change in life events the more likely was the individual's mental status to have changed. A net increase in life events was associated with a worsening of symptoms, while a net decrease resulted in improvement. Similar patterns were found for most of the 64 individual life events [or which information was gathered as well as for events categorized according to type of social activity, changes in the respondent's social field, and degree of desirability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article refers to "The Impact of Federal Mortgage Insurance Programs on Ann Arbor's Home Mortgage Market, 1956," a survey by James C. T. Mao, and provides information about small-city mortgage markets. Statistics are given for the lending volume in Middletown, Connecticut and Hagerstown, Maryland--two cities where institutional lenders participate in the Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Administration loan programs which insure or guarantee mortgage loans. The relationship between the size of financial institutions and proportion of their mortgage portfolios is mentioned, as well as research by J. E. Morton, "Urban Mortgage Lending: Comparative Markets and Experience."

Maurice R. Davie of Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut will become the editor of the journal "American Sociological Review" beginning with the October 1949 issue. Manuscripts submitted for publication in the "American Sociological Review" should be sent to Davie after May 1. Books submitted for review should be sent to Davie after July 1. Present editor will continue to edit the journal to and including the August issue. Davie has selected Stephen W. Reed of University Hall of Graduate Studies, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut as his book review editor.

The seventh annual meeting of the Eastern Sociological Conference was held in New Haven, Connecticut., April 18th and 19th, with over a hundred persons in attendance. The central topic of the Conference was Social Theory and the Social Order. The majority of the sessions centered around a discussion of Capitalism, Fascism, Socialism, and Communism as divergent social orders. Among others who read papers dealing with this general question were Theodore Abel, Joseph Folsom, Scott Nearing, H.A. Miller, Harry Ladler, and Roger Baldwin. Additional sections were devoted to social economics, religion and the social order, social work, the nature of sociology, and education in relation to the social order. At the annual banquet addresses were delivered by James W. Woodward, the retiring president, on "Some Implications from Sociology for the Social Order," and Harry Elmer Barnes, "History and the Problem of the Social Order."

This article focuses on the book "Beyond the Best Interests of the Child," by Joseph Goldstein, Anna Freud and Albert Solnit of Yale University Law School at New Haven in Connecticut. According to the author, the book ought to have significance beyond its reconceptualization of the law of child custody and it ought to be a landmark in the history of cooperation between social scientists and lawyers. However, besides all these achievements, the book's greatest utility is an example of the wrong way of employing social science to solve the problems of social policy. Moreover, the book can be used as a case study to demonstrate that policy developed with disregard for social responsibilities may be unwise or harmful. The book possesses two major thrusts, one of which relates to the objectives that courts ought to pursue in child custody cases, and the second relates to psychoanalytic propositions which, the author maintains, ought to be built into the law. Nevertheless, the idea projected in the book that courts do not have the competence to supervise a child's development in order to secure its best interests, is revolutionary.

"Eye on the Family" is the theme for the 1962 annual meetings of the association NCFR to be held at Storrs, Connecticut, from August 22-24. Papers and suggestions for the section sessions may be sent to the section chairmen or to the program chairman.

This article presents the main outline of the first semester of the Statistics course at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut in 1970. The developing reproachment between theorizing and methods in general has not directed enough attention to the connection between theorizing and statistics. Sociologists have paid most attention to this problem at relatively advanced levels, for example the use of statistics to test causal inference. In order to integrate theory and statistics, the course begins with symbolic logic, set theory and probability. On this foundation we enter the study of statistics, spending minimal time on measurement theory, estimates of central tendency, and dispersion of distributions. Symbolic logic is used to get students to state hypotheses clearly and to see what empirical results must occur if the hypotheses are to be considered true. The first semester closes with measures of association, taking correlation and regression as the basic paradigm, then introducing ordinal and nominal measures.

This article presents information regarding public finance in the U.S. A leading prominent in public affairs, a well-trained economist, and the very capable tax commissioner of the state make a balanced commission, and their report is correspondingly valuable, at once abreast of present science and pointedly attentive to the real condition and practical needs of the state. For the intelligent citizen of Connecticut and for the specialist in taxation the report is of great value throughout, While, naturally, the general scientific analysis is of rather narrow range, it is usually close and good, and it is clear everywhere. Notable illustrations are found in the brief general introduction and in the discussion of the taxation of insurance companies. Even higher merit, however, must be assigned to the report ,for its elaborate historical and descriptive account of Connecticut's corporation taxes, its criticism of their working, and its suggestions of change. General banking and trust companies and stock insurance companies, all, especially the last, very important in Connecticut, are now taxed upon the market values of their shares, and for all these the commission proposes merely the substitution of book values for market values.

Connecticut is a highly industrialized state. It is seen that close to one-half of its gainfully employed people and over one-fifth of its total population are engaged in industry. The population of Connecticut is composed of a variety of ethnic groups. The article is based on a 3 percent sample of ten ethnic groups in Connecticut. By taking into consideration such factors as the size of each group at the several crucial immigration periods and their natural increase, and checking the results with estimates obtained from local group leaders, a quite dose estimate, it is believed, has been reached. Of the 19,319 individuals covered by the sample 6,197 or 32 percent were found to be engaged in industry. The role played by each group in the industry of Connecticut, that is its participation in terms of numbers of individuals, depends to a large extent upon the size of the group. As a rule, the larger the group the larger is the number of its members in every branch of industry. Nevertheless, a group may concentrate in one field rather than another, or even be almost or entirely unrepresented in some. This fact undoubtedly indicates the existence of differences in the economic, social, and cultural status among the groups, as some fields are known to offer greater security, more lucrative employment, or, in general, to carry more prestige than others.

Connecticut presents a perfect case study of differential correctional treatment for young male and female offenders. The state controls two juvenile correctional institutions, the Long Lane School (LLS) in Middletown for girls and the Connecticut School for Boys (CSB) in Meriden. Both facilities have existed practically side-by-side for over a century under state management, yet they have evolved in markedly different ways. Several remedies suggest themselves after studying the conditions of incarceration for female juvenile offenders in the State of Connecticut. However, an understanding of causes of those conditions and the practical obstacles to change leads to a rejection of most traditional approaches, namely litigation which is often effectively mooted and legislative action. It is conceivable that the commissioner might welcome litigation in some instances to force legislative appropriations for new resources and facilities. Press coverage might also be encouraged if inspired by reporters concerned with arousing public interest and involvement in the correctional process and not with sporadic sensationalist exposes which only serve to kindle public fear and anger.

In late 1955 in Connecticut, the number of fatalities per 100,000 population in motor vehicle accidents reached a record high for the 1950s. On December 23, 1955, Governor Abraham Ribicoff took unprecedented action to reduce traffic fatalities. Ribicoff announced that persons convicted of speeding would have their licenses suspended for thirty days at the first offense, for sixty days at the second offense, and for an indefinite period at the third offense. Data on traffic fatalities before and after the Connecticut crackdown on speeding can be regarded as a time-series quasi-experiment with some significance for the social sciences. Evidence of the effectiveness of the Connecticut crackdown on speeding can be gained by comparing the path of the post-time observations of Connecticut with those of the four control states. The statistical model upon which analysis of the Connecticut speeding data is based was developed by G.E.P. Box and G.C. Tiao. Box and Tiao presented an analytic technique for estimating and making inferences about the change in level of a time-series.

Social research frequently encounters the task of evaluating change produced in non-randomly selected groups by events which are beyond the researcher's control. The social scientist must verify that there has in fact been a change, and that the indicated event is its cause. This article introduces, in the context of a problem in applied sociology and the sociology of law, a mode of analysis designed to deal with a common class of situations in which research must proceed without the benefit of experimental control. The general methodology expounded here is termed "quasi-experimental analysis." The specific mode of analysis is the "interrupted time-series design." Perhaps its fundamental credo is that lack of control and lack of randomization are damaging to inferences of cause and effect only to the extent that a systematic consideration of alternative explanations reveals some that are plausible. The 1955 crackdown on speeding in the state of Connecticut furnishes an apt example of the potentialities of such quasi-experimental analysis.

To date, studies of residential propinquity as a factor in selecting marriage partners have concentrated almost entirely on urban patterns and, while they have produced interesting generalizations, they have overlooked density of population as a relevant factor and have, in one case at least, led to questionable inferences regarding small towns. The present study is not intended as a criticism of its predecessors. The nature of their material quite justifiably precluded density as a factor, and they were, of course, not responsible for inferences concerning material outside their scope. The purpose of this article is, first, to consider the pattern of propinquity for a small town and, second, to propose relative size of various population groupings as a variable to be added to those already noted. The subject of the present study is Simsbury, Connecticut, the population of which grew from 3,625 in 1930 to 3,941 in 1939, the period studied. Information was obtained from all marriage licenses on file in the town clerk's office for this period.

In an earlier study on suburbanization in Connecticut, it was pointed out that the population was increasing rapidly in towns situated adjacent to the larger cities. A series of studies was launched for the purpose of describing the suburban movement and the resulting socio-economic adjustments. The first study consisted of a house to house survey of the families living in the town of Windsor, Connecticut. Windsor is a rural town near Hartford. It has a population of about 8300 and an important agriculture. It was found that slightly more than one family out of every five living in the town in 1934 had moved there during the preceding five-year period. Most of them had come from the city of Hartford in search of a country home near their work in the city. The authors of the above study expressed an opinion that migration in a suburban area is not a one-way process it The present study was undertaken to describe the amount of out- migration from Windsor, to relate this to the amount of in-migration, and to discuss certain aspects of the selectivity involved.

This is a first report on a study on the differences between "promising" and "problem" youth in the inner-city neighborhoods of New Haven, Connecticut. The sample was drawn from lists of lower class youth nominated by knowledgeable residents of these neighborhoods as "among the most promising" and as "headed for trouble." The several steps in the nominating and sampling procedure, which will be described later, were designed to provide sharply contrasting types. The definitions of behavior used in the nomination are specific to the depressed neighborhoods in which the youth live, giving maximum play to neighborhood judgments rather than legal ones. The usual pattern in delinquency studies is to rely on the criteria of law-enforcement and judicial agencies to identify delinquents. Because these criteria have certain deficiencies, an alternative and perhaps preferable approach is to use neighborhood criteria to identify "delinquents" and "nondelinquents" for study purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is based on a study which explored the reasons why some Americans have been joining a denomination in one community. The locale of the study is a town of Hartford, Connecticut. The denomination is the Congregational-Christian, the three churches of which draw their clientele from what may be described loosely as the middle class. The authors drew their sample from people who had joined these churches recently. The total membership of all three churches in 1960 was 5.2 percent of the town's population. The sample was drawn from the people who joined the churches during a three-year period ending in October, 1960. This time span was selected to get a period short enough not to impede recall and long enough to provide data for statistical manipulation. There are twenty-three churches. Thirteen of these are Protestant, five Catholic, three Jewish, and two Undenominational. Protestant church members, who are numerically superior to the other faiths, comprised about 14 percent of the town's population in 1960. Since 1940 Protestant church membership increased from 3732 (about 11 percent of the town's population) to 8500. During the period 1940-1960 Congregational church membership doubled, and data from the largest church show that increased joining, not increasing longevity of member-ship, has been responsible for this increase.

This article discusses an experiment conducted in Connecticut in the 1960s which discovered that persons interviewed before the election by the Survey Research Center voted in greater proportion than those not interviewed beforehand. As part of other research on ethnic identification, the experimenters randomly sampled 104 subjects with Italian surnames from the list of registered voters in the 14th ward in New Haven, Connecticut. The subjects were randomly assigned to the experimental interview group and the comparison interview group. Eight graduate students interviewed the experimental subjects on their preferences for several real and imaginary candidates for public office. The dependent variable was the voting rate of the experimental and comparison groups in two primary elections. The experiment found that being interviewed by a public opinion pollster increased the probability that the respondent would vote in subsequent elections and the experimenters have suggested that this effect was mediated by a reduction in political alienation or perceived isolation from the political system. The findings probably generalize to other ethnic groups and to other low turnout elections with minimal publicity such as local elections and referenda.

The objective of the study on which this article is based was to assay the status of education and of educators by an intensive interview of a large sample of the people of one community. The data which follow are the results of a survey conducted by the author and a staff of research assistants during the spring and summer of 1918 in New London, Connecticut. The findings of the present article concern the status of education. Another article, reporting findings on the status of educators, appeared in the July 1953 issue of "The American Journal of Sociology." A clarification of aspects of educational status with which this article is concerned is provided by groups into which questions are divided. The first group is concerned with the respondents' opinions on the necessity of an education; the second, with their opinions about the rights which are believed to obtain in this field; the third, with the matter of public and private operation of schools; the fourth, with the degree of popular interest in schools; and the last, with the complex question of financial aid to education.

A number of empirical studies have been undertaken in recent years on food-price differentials across stores in metropolitan areas and have shed considerable light on this question. To date, the most detailed statistical analysis on whether the urban poor pay more for food than do urban residents with higher incomes is the study of food prices in New York City, New York. On the basis of their statistical-regression results for 37 commodities, they conclude that the price of a given commodity in a particular type of store tends to be unaffected by, or even rises with, an increase in the level of neighborhood income. They also point out, however, that the mean price of each of the items studied is higher in the small independent stores than in the chain stores. To the extent that poor people shop at these smaller stores, they pay higher prices for the same quality food than if they had purchased their groceries at a chain store. This article should be viewed as a first effort to develop a formal framework for understanding consumer purchasing decisions. The questionnaire administered in New Haven, Connecticut, uncovered a number of other factors, which appear to play an important role in the choice of store and package size.

This article describes methods and findings of a study undertaken in co-operation with the Hartford City Welfare Department, in Connecticut, which helped to remove the problem from the arena of political exploitation and place it in a perspective that strengthened the position of the supporters of decent standards, by identifying actual reasons for the city's increasingly burdensome relief load and pointing the way to constructive long-range solutions. Connecticut is one of the several states in which General Assistance is administered locally. The "categorical aid" programs are administered by the State Welfare Department through eight district offices and are financed wholly by state funds with federal matching. General Assistance is administered by the state's 169 towns and is financed by local funds raised by property taxes. The State Welfare Department reimburses 50 percent of assistance expenditures from a state General Fund appropriation, but there is no provision for state sharing of administrative costs. The local administration of General Assistance, financed by local and state funds alongside categories of Public assistance administered by the state and financed by state and federal funds, engendered a conflict of interest which intensified the problem confronting Connecticut cities. The study sample consisted of 247 cases. The sample cases for which presumptive eligibility was identified received slightly higher awards, on the average, than ineligible cases.

The article discusses the real estate holdings of the churches in an industrial New England city, New Haven, Connecticut, a community which displays a wide variety of economic activity, ranging from agriculture to highly developed industry and business finance. In population New Haven is an amalgam of first settler English stock, of members of most of the waves of immigration to the United States, of Negroes, and of the offspring of all these groups. The church is one of the most dramatically changing institutions in the society. In real estate, the church is one institution among many, exhibiting the stigmata of the prevailing culture. In so far as church property exceeds in valuation and quality of appointments the requirements of mere utility, an element of conspicuous consumption characterizes it. Such excess of property over the demands of utility involves a pious ostentation, the tax-exemption of which constitutes a culturally and politically approving recognition of a basic non-utility.