Search

Occurrence of subsequent pregnancies is often used to measure success or failure in programs for young mothers. This paper reviews methodological problems involved in measuring rates of subsequent pregnancies, proposes the use of a life-table method, and illustrates its use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The interrelationship of city and country is a question of vital concern to the rapidly changing modern civilization, and its full discussion would involve consideration of a wide range of issues and problems. In the paper this question is approached from the point of view of its bearing upon the organization and administration of social work in rural districts on a more comprehensive basis than has hitherto proved practicable. During recent years those interested in the improvement of social conditions have recognized more clearly than ever before the need of extending social work programs into small town and open country communities. Thus far results have been disappointing in this field in spite of a few signal successes. It is impossible to promote any far-reaching plan of social organization without encountering the traditional conflict between a city and country, which has wrecked many schemes of social and political reform. An understanding, therefore, of city-country interrelationships becomes essential for the development of a sound policy upon which may be based more adequate and comprehensive social work programs.

Vulnerability to deprivation has often been regarded as a function, of constitutional factors, and in this paper an attempt is made to isolate one of these, namely, activity level, and to show its relation to individual differences in the reactions of infants to a deprivation experience. The hypothesis that inactive infants are more likely to be adversely affected than active infants is investigated in the context of a project in which measures for both activity level and vulnerability to deprivation were obtained. The findings indicate a significant relation in support of the hypothesis, and the suggestion is made that, at this period of life, organismic factors may be of greater consequence in determining outcome than such parameters as age or length of deprivation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Relates the experience of the author in conducting an investigation of Finnish settlements in north-eastern Minnesota. Selection of various agricultural lands; Effects of environmental conditions on the lives of various individuals; Number of Finns living in the Great Lakes Region.

Copyright of Rural Sociology is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

ABSTRACT The concept of insurable value of a human life, despite its central importance to life insurance, is not carefully developed in the literature. This article attempts to clarify the concept of insurable value and to carefully distinguish it from the related concept of economic or human life value. The article then states a method of measuring insurable value and of relating this measure to the life insurance product. Finally, the article traces some of the marketing implications of the proposed view of insurable value. Many of these implications relate to the issue of the role of investment life insurance and the uses of term insurance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on a study which outlined the problems in defining the human life value concept and its implications to the life insurance industry in the U.S. The human life value concept can be used for diverse purposes, and even within one area of usage it may have more than one application. The question then is whether the human life value for an individual is fixed, or whether it is a function of its purpose. In the area of disability income insurance, the human life value will be used to compare the present value of future benefits for individuals who are disabled, to the present value of future earnings if they had not been disabled. The case of disability income is similar to recovery for wrongful death in that the discounting factor includes death.

The article discusses economic costs of war. War is a stupendous phenomenon of economic dynamics, and yet it apparently reverses the ordinary economic processes in a way that should put it beyond the application of the principles of science. The war fund, when secured, reverses the effect of ordinary capital, in that it is spent at once instead of being embodied in a self-perpetuating fund, and the spending of it intensifies a work of destruction carried on by a kind of human effort which itself is the reversal of ordinary labor. There is a place in the science for the private contentions that are involved in defining and vindicating the ownership of wealth that is, in maintaining the institution of property. It is a crude institution in primitive times and is maintained in rough and irregular way. The club of the owner does the work of that of the policeman. International rights today are like the individual rights in their crudest stage and are attacked and defended in a similarly lawless and violent manner. If the victor can secure the terms described, he has nothing to gain by prolonging the struggle. Everything that, by further fighting, be can add to his gains will be neutralized by the cost of it. Whatever he can save in cost he should deduct from the terms which, by further fighting, he could ultimately exact, and to do otherwise would mark his conduct as dictated by unintelligent anger or revenge, rather than by self-interest as revealed by rational, even if heartless, calculation.

The article discusses the significance of "casual explanation" in social research. "Causal explanation" means explanation according to a set of laws. The laws express certain empirical regularities, which imply that whenever certain conditions or events occur certain other events occur. Causal research implies search for regularities or orders between sets of elements. Causal explanation in a more limited sense implies deriving statements about effect conditions from a set of laws and from statements about cause conditions. In some types of social research causal explanation means, explanation in terms of conditional relationships between dichotomic variants. Causal analysis in terms of conditional relations means asking questions such as what are the necessary, sufficient or necessary-and-sufficient conditions of a given property. The given property is called the conditioned property. It gives us in formation of great importance for predictions in real life situations. It may show that certain correlations now used for predictive purposes hold only under certain conditions.

The article focuses on a critical examination of two frames of reference for the study of sociological aspects of social problems. No definition of social problems will be attempted here. Suffice it to say that they are practical difficulties in real life, while sociological problems involve the abstraction of certain phases or aspects for intensive study. A sociologist may appropriately examine ways in which certain events and conditions come to be regarded as evils. He may seek to learn what culture traits are associated with evils and what social processes, if any, are involved in their appearance. He may limit his research even more and inquire whether any relation exists between a given evil and the breakdown of a certain type of social group, or how much the presence of this evil affects the social participation of certain persons. There are many sociological problems which may be abstracted from a given type of practical difficulty. On the other hand, any given sociological problem may reappear in relation to many different practical issues. The solution of a sociological problem is not the immediate relief of distress, but the identification and measurement of relationships and processes.

Instances of political behavior which bear no rational relationship to maximizing a group's material and social self-interest may be explained as responses to subcultural factors. Religious groups in America, despite their generally high level of acculturation, still retain ethical and belief systems which influence basic conservative liberal political orientations. The criteria used to distinguish sect from church seem to be of less importance in shaping political predispositions than beliefs centering around revealed dogma, salvation, impulse life, intellectualism vs. faith, and the nature of evil. The cultural belief systems of the various denominations operate as independent variables within the social structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of a saint presents evidence from his confessions which supports the view that both creative and religious illumination are variations of a single human theme, one of nature's ways of solving conflicts inherently a part of human life. In these experiences of unity not only are inner problems resolved but, in addition, some vision of truth is perceived which tends to alter, never to be the same again, both the individual and his world. Humanity's great religious figures and great creators invariably transform both themselves and their world. This helps to explain the ambivalence and irrationality with which such individuals are viewed by their fellowmen. With these considerations in mind let one consider confessions of a saint, using insights of psychoanalysis as a tool. In doing so one should be aware of the tendency in psychological studies of this sort to analyze creative people without acknowledging their creativity in its own terms. In attempting to explain the role of certain intrapsychic and social forces in a saint's life one does not explain his creativity.

Social thinker, Saint Augustine's intellectual development was in a context rich with choice. The Mediterranean world of the fourth century must have provided as many open options to the inquiring mind as any era and arena ever. Moving freely about this world, the young Augustine exposed himself to many influences and actually sampled several positions before he finally, in his mid-thirties, settled on the particular Christian position to which he was thereafter committed. The career of Augustine precisely because the role of environmental influences seems indeterminate leaves an especially large amount of room for entertaining psychological considerations as a factor in his intellectual development. It is not perfectly clear that he was ever outside the pale of what one would call today nominal Christianity. It is even less clear that he was ever tree especially in view of the insistent influence of his mother to achieve a final resolution except within the limits of a Christian commitment.

The article presents information on a method for studying certain aspects of parish life and reports the results of its application in a particular case. The hypothesis is that in differentiating several classes of contributors the parishioners recognized, not merely differences in ability to pay, but also differences in prestige within the parish group. Analysis reveals the sources of such prestige differences and their effects within the formal organization of the parish. The parish studied is located in a rural area of the northern Middle West. It was organized during the 1880's as a mission of the Catholic Church in the county seat some six miles distant, now a small town of about 6,500 inhabitants, and the only population aggregate over village size in the county. Church, rectory, school, and cemetery are situated in a hamlet with less than a hundred persons. Other service agencies in this center are a grocery, tavern, garage and public consolidated elementary and high school. Membership in the parish has increased at a fairly steady rate since it's founding.

The article focuses Indians settled in Andean America. The peoples of the present Andean States are to a large extent political heirs of the great empire of the Incas. Just as the inhabitants of various portions of the Roman Empire gradually achieved sufficient national unity to forge the modern States found there today, so, in Andean America, the people are still in the process of creating national unity. The Inca way of life was autochthonous to the mountain-girdled plateaus on which it had developed, and the Incas had no concept of private property in the modern Anglo-Saxon sense of those words. The nineteenth century was one of upheaval and turmoil for various reasons. The Andean States had developed no middle class, although the class of mestizos, with more or less Indian blood in their veins, had gradually come into being. But class differences in the Indo-Latin countries have always tended to be based on wealth and rank rather than on race. The psychological aspect of the lack of integration of the Andean Indian into modern economic life should not be overlooked. The Indian has understood and practiced passive resistance for over four hundred years, and it looks as if he might triumph in the end.

The article focuses on the attempt to use the technique of the sociology of knowledge in an investigation of the life and writings of William Graham Sumner, professor of political and social science at Yale from 1872 to 1910. Throughout his work is found a constant emphasis on the desirability of the practice of these virtues--the constant renunciation of the present in favor of the future, human fore sight, hard work, self-denial, industry, temperance, prudence, frugality. So also a constant depreciation of these vices--an appetite for luxury, vice, sloth, dithyrambic rhetoric, lack of thrift, laziness. This complex of value-attitudes is the ethic of intra-worldly asceticism. The problem, then, of explaining the relationship between class position and intra-worldly asceticism in the life of Sumner is a social psychological problem. Intra-wordly asceticism becomes the dependent variable, class position an independent variable. His life represents a success story of social ascent, emancipation from a working-class milieu and the rise of an intellectual to the role of a nationally prominent political professor.

The article discusses the origin of Tolstoyan communities in England. As a boy, Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy worshipped Jean-Jacques Rousseau, so much that around his neck he wore a small medallion portrait of Rousseau instead of an orthodox cross. Tolstoy carried his aversions to extremes. Not only did he reject the modern State, but all efforts to organize the external condition of men's lives. He held that such efforts diverted attention from men's inner needs and to countenance them was a sin. These efforts, usually based in his view on violence, were the social counterpart of the individual ego, and he would have none of them, advocating a clean-cut break with the predatory State. Tolstoy looked forward to a new Christian order, an organic society based on the self-government and brotherly cooperation of free men working in federated groups. These groups were to be small communities, with as close a connection with nature as was possible. These communities were later came to be known as Tolstoyan communities.

Focuses on the life and works of Charles F. Brooks, geographer in Minnesota. Educational background; Career history; Contributions of Charles F. Brooks in the study of climates.

Explores microgeography in a piece of land in northern Illinois. Inclusion of microgeography and illustrations; Involvement of the interlocking of human life over the whole earth in problems of the time; Observation of establishments from a geographic point of view.

Delves into Polar Eskimos who lived in Greenland. Description of the life of Polar Eskimos; Diseases that have destroyed the lives of Eskimos; Discussion of the Eskimo villages.