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The article presents information on the population of Philippines. On May 6, 1970, the number of inhabitants in the Philippines were counted and reported to be 36,684,486. This latest enumeration makes the Filipino nation the sixth largest in Asia and the fifteenth most populous in the world. Growing at a faster percentage rate than many other nations in Asia, in Africa, and in Latin America, the Philippine intercensal rate of growth indicated an increase from an average 1.9 percent in 1940s to 3.1 percent in 1950s. The reported census figure for 1970 gives 3.0 percent as the average rate of growth for 1960s. Whatever the true figure be for the decade of 1960s the country is still growing at a very fast annual rate. If this rate be 3.45 per cent, and should this rate continue, the Philippines will double her population to 74 millions in little over 20 years. By the year 2040, she will have more people than the United States. A major consequence of reduced mortality has been a dramatic rise in life expectancy at birth for Filipinos.

This article presents information related to the family building patterns of young Manila couples. Research in recent decades, utilizing a variety of population variables and characteristics and finding significant interactions between these factors and population movements, has made it evident that there is no single causal factor or a single clearly defined causal chain capable of explaining population phenomena. The fashion in which these sociological elements are combined is dependent upon the historical sociological structure. Recognizing the importance of the family structure and its cultural context which shapes and guides the thinking and activities of married couples, a number of studies at local levels have been and are being undertaken in the Philippines, attempting to shed some light on the interrelationships between socio-cultural elements and population growth phenomena. The Philippines has one of the highest population growth rates in the world. It stands at an estimated average of 3.3 per cent for the decade 1965-1970, which is some 60 per cent above world average. A third of Manila brides who married between the ages of 30 and 34 years reportedly had younger husbands.

The registration of vital events in the Philippines has long been defective and is therefore an unreliable indicator of birth and death rates. Tests for completeness of birth and death registration made in 1956 in Central Luzon indicated an under-registration of births by 35 per cent and deaths by 10 per cent. Cognizant of the need for developing methods of vital and health registration suited to the needs of modernizing countries, the Inter-Agency Committee on Vital and Health Statistics resolved as early as 1958 to request the President of the Philippines to issue an Executive Order creating the National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics. The objectives of such a National Committee are essentially those defined by the First International Conference on National Committees in London in 1953. The declaration of the physician or midwife in attendance at the birth or, in default thereof, the declaration of either parent of the newborn child, shall be sufficient for the registration of a birth in the civil register. No human body shall be buried unless the proper death certificate has been presented and recorded in the office of the local civil registrar.

The article presents a discussion on the socio-economic characteristics of families in Eastern and Western Visayas in the Philippines during 1960. The article summarizes the findings of an on-going study of a 0.5 per cent sample of households enumerated in 1960 in the nine cities and eleven provinces of Eastern and Western Visayas. According to the study, urban wives were more highly educated than their rural sisters. Attention is drawn to the high proportion (53 per cent) of rural women aged 45-64 years who have had no education at all, in contrast to only 38 per cent in these age groups residing in the cities of West and East Visayas. Close to three-fourths of the married women were white-collar workers with the highest concentration found in villages. Farming ranked next among rural wives, while their urban counterparts preferred blue-collar occupations. Blue-collar workers reported a greater number of children than white-collar workers. There were very slight differences in the marital fertility of women in urban and rural areas of the Visayas. Fertility ratios for wives aged 45-54 years in the rural sector were not much higher than corresponding ratios for the urban places. If urban influences were to filter gradually, to the rural sectors, the latter may be expected to exhibit decline in fertility.

This article discusses migration differentials in the Visayas in the Philippines. Differential migration may be defined as selective migration which tends to involve some sections of the population more than others. The differences in movement vary widely from place to place and over time and the selectivity of migration fluctuates with the nature of social change and the composition of the population involved in the change. In the process of elaborating his theme, the sociologist Donald J. Bogue formulated several hypotheses and described techniques for measuring differential migration. He submitted the claim that such hypotheses could be consistent with migration events in other nations. Bogue traces the development of migration streams as undergoing several stages. The composition of persons participating in the move changes at each stage of movement. The pattern and intensity of the age differential varied among the sub-groups of migrants. For the two regions, the differential migration' associated with age tended to be much more intense among female than male migrants. Almost without exception, the indexes of differential migration for women rise to a greater height at some point in the middle and oldest ages and sink to a greater low at the younger or middle age groups.

The article presents two instances of ritualized mourning that were examined as examples of crowd behavior. One of these was a Holy Week observance described for Tzintzuntzan, Mexico, while the other was the funeral complex of a small town in southeast Luzon, Philippines. It was hypothesized on this slim basis that crowd behavior was characterized by culturally recognized stimuli, selective response, and the peculiarity of the crowd situation. Among the Toda the placing of the body of the deceased in the hut or diary is the signal for female relatives and friends of the dead person to gather around the structure to lament together in the characteristic Toda manner arranging themselves in pairs and pressing their foreheads together while they wail and weep. Again it is the placing of the corpse by the head of an expiring buffalo that brings the Toda to surround the two bodies and lament in the same vigorous fashion. Among the Brahmans, silence is prescribed for the first half-hour after death. Furthermore after the burning of the body on the funeral pyre, the members of the funeral party sit outside the house of the dead person and weep till the new head of the house gives them permission to leave.

The article focuses on the sociological aspects of bureaucracy. The structure of bureaucracy, its growth and developments, and its relation with the social and political environment has long been of interest to social scientists. One aspect of the environment in which a formal governmental structure might exist is paternalism, a characteristic with effect far more general than those it might have on the administrative structure. Paternalism in government is commonly taken to mean the principle or practice of managing or regulating the affairs of a country or community, or of individuals, in the manner of a father dealing with his children. Such a practice presupposes a personal, preferably but not necessarily face-to-face, relationship between the governor and the governed. The privilege of direct, personal appeal is the prerogative of both parties to the relationship. Despite its bureaucratic organization, the Philippine government is to most Filipinos not an exploiting mechanism to be dreaded or feared as a necessary evil. In the Philippine example, the co-existence of paternalism and bureaucracy is related to a number of structural and historical factors.

The article is a comment by the author on the discussion related to education and fertility in Philippine, by Michael A. Costello. The author feels that, Dr. Costello has lost sight of the fact that although the relation between education and fertility is not always inverse, the former (education) does not affect fertility directly but acts through many variables that in turn deter- mine fertility. Education has multiple, partially offsetting, effects on the biological supply of births or fecundity. Increased fecundity can be offset by in- creased contraceptive use but the latter is expected to lag behind the former. Education cannot be expected to automatically reduce fertility in all circumstances. Author feels, to design the best educational strategy, it is necessary to know what kind of education should be increased, not merely to say that education should be increased since the immediate consequence is an increased fertility under certain circumstances. Education is more likely to reduce fertility in urban than in rural areas.

The article presents a report on developments in the Philippine Sociological Society (PSS). At a Board meeting held on August 11, 1971, the Secretary of the Society was instructed to send out several special notices to PSS members, which she did under date of September 10, 1971. Along with most Philippine corporations, the PSS elects its officers through a two-step Process. First the members of the Society elect Board Members and these in turn meet to elect officers from among themselves a president, a vice-president, a secretary, and a treasurer. Related to the 1972 elections are several amendments to the PSS By-laws. However, somewhat as in the case of the Philippine Senate, only some of the directors will be replaced in the annual elections.