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In recent years there has been a great deal of public concern that our youth are "at risk" - of drug addiction, falling into criminal behavior, teen-age pregnancy, dropping out of school, and of drunk or otherwise careless driving which leads to serious accidents. (National Research Council, 1993; Hamburg, 1992; Heckinger, 1994). The popular press also expresses these concerns, which are widespread in the population at large, often referring to contemporary youth as "a lost generation" which is "armed, young and dangerous."(1) Despite the hyperbole, only a modest proportion of young people run the more dramatic risks noted in the press. There is another risk to which a great many adolescents, including a significant proportion of those in the "mainstream," are exposed. That risk, as we see it, is the risk of failure to develop in adolescence the qualities which will make it possible for the youth to function adequately in the roles which, inevitably, they will be obliged to play when they move from adolescence into adult status. The adolescent developmental phase is particularly critical for study because it provides not only a base-line summary of the child's and youth's previous experience, but also permits insight into the adaptive psychological and social capacities involved in the transition to adult status and mature functioning. Among the various developmental tasks involved in the transition from adolescence to adulthood are the acquisition of adaptive social and psychological capacities, skills, values and habits which facilitate the adolescent's movement into, and adequate performance in, culturally appropriate adult roles. We have set as our research agenda to conceptualize what some of these adaptive qualities might be; to develop measures of the extent to which they are manifested in different individuals and groups approached cross-culturally and cross-nationally; to identify the socio-psychological antecendents and the behavioral consequences of more and less adaptive "transitions to adulthood;" and ultimately to suggest interventions at the individual and group level which might facilitate more rapid and effective maturity in adolescents. Of these goals, only the first two, of conceptualization and initial measurement are addressed in this article. One of the first challenges any such effort must expect to meet is that which comes from the idea that social roles are so diverse, and so specific to particular ethnic, social, class, and national groups and contexts that no meaningful specification of role demands in general can meaningfully be made. We did not accept this judgement, and our research may be interpreted as an empirical test of the soundness of the argument that generalization of adaptive qualities across a set of roles is not possible. Even if one assumes that there are common elements in the demands on the individual made by certain roles, there remains a choice of approaches to identifying what those common elements might be. One way to identify them is to make a list of specific roles and the behaviors associated with them. For example, in modem nations each adult is expected to develop some occupational identity, train to attain it, and meet the standards of performance which are characteristic of it. Keeping this aspect of being adult in mind, we might then study how far adolescents were beginning to think of an occupation, and whether they were in any way systematically preparing themselves to meet its formal requirements. A different way of approaching the problem would be to abstract certain qualities which are assumed to be important across a set of roles, and then to test for the extent to which a given adolescent or group of adolescents were developing these more general dispositions. It was this latter approach we adopted, deciding to measure the extent to which certain adolescents showed strong or weak development of six qualities. These are: Cooperativeness: the ability to work jointly with others in advancing group goals in a relatively impersonal organizational framework. …

A number of issues have arisen from the publication of Becoming Modern by Inkeles and Smith. This paper raises each issue in turn and attempts to support the major assertions of that study. Included are the reasons for studying the individual, the role of personality characteristics, the personal features of modernity, the universality and empirical status of the concept, some sources of individual modernity, relationships between modernity, stress, and alienation, the contrast between modernity and traditionalism, and the consequences of individual modernity for one's society.

Literacy rates across nations are substantially related to a wide range of variables that make up, go with, cause, or result from economic development.' But the correlation coefficients that indicate these broad relationships cannot explain their own origin. Explanations must come from a detailed search for the ways in which the teaching of men to read and write influences their performance of such crucial social roles as citizen, worker, and consumer. This paper explores, for one country, the associations between literacy and a number of important social psychological characteristics directly relevant to participation in economic and political development at the level of the common man. The data come from lengthy structured interviews with 177 rural cultivators and 385 urban factory workers in East Pakistan.2 The two quite different populations-cultivators and factory workers-provide internal replication of the results and help us disentangle literacy effects from the factors of urbanization and occupational type. We will look first at the extent to which measured literacy is associated with two other apparently similar variables, level of education and verbal aptitude. Second, we will illustrate empirically and discuss more speculatively several ways in which literacy is related-and not related-to the development of new identities, perceptions, and attitudes.

In this paper I will endeavor to do the following: (1) test how far certain concepts dealing with individual orientations to politics, previously used in studies of relatively advanced European societies, are appropriate to populations in developing countries; (2) ascertain how far these separate dimensions of individual political orientation cohere as a syndrome, indicating the existence of a general underlying dimension of “participant citizenship;” (3) identify elements among common orientations to politics which cannot be incorporated in this general syndrome; and (4) assess the importance of certain social experiences or forces in inculcating the qualities of participant citizenship in individuals exposed to these influences.These objectives will be better understood if they are seen in the context of the larger research program of which this report is a part, namely the Harvard Project on the Social and Cultural Aspects of Economic Development. The project is an investigation of the forms and sources of modernization in individuals. Its focus is on the person rather than the society or the institution, and its emphasis is socio-psychological rather than purely sociological or structural. Six countries are represented: Argentina and Chile, East Pakistan and India, Nigeria and Israel. This report will not, however, emphasize national differences, but rather treat each sample as another replication of the basic design. We assume that if something holds true for six such different countries, it must be a powerful connection indeed.

PJ, HE scheduling of a joint section meeting of the American 1Political Science Association and the American Sociological Society on "The Understanding of a Foreign Culture" may be taken as evidence that American social scientists feel the study of foreign societies to be a problem of increasing concern.' It may perhaps also indicate that they are not fully satisfied with the progress made to date. Since this is a period given to radical innovations in social science, however, it seems appropriate to offer the caution that our problem cannot properly be defined as one of developing a new science of foreign societies. There cannot be one social science for the study of one's own country and a different one for the study of other nations. The primary task is not that of making our research methods more adequate for the study of foreign societies, but of improving our conceptual tools and methodological equipment to make us more effective in the study of any society. This paper, therefore, seeks to point out some general features of the sociologist's orientation which suit him to the task of contributing-along with other social scientiststo the understanding of social systems as such. At the same time, it seeks to maintain a focus on the problem of understanding foreign societies by drawing its illustrative material primarily from experience in interdisciplinary research on the Soviet Union. Although not explicitly concerned with international relations, this paper assumes that understanding the social systems of the participating national states is of special relevance to the student of world politics.

The Project on the Social and Cultural Aspects of Economic Development at Harvard's Center for International Affairs interviewed 6,000 men from six developing countries to study the impact on the individual of his exposure to and participation in the process of national and economic modernization. To a striking degree, the same syndrome of attitudes, values, and ways of acting-such as openness to new experience, independence from parental authority, and taking an active part in civic affairs-defines the modern man in each of the six countries and in all the occupational groups of cultivator, craftsman, and industrial worker. Education is the most powerful factor in making men modern, but occupational experience in large-scale organizations, and especially in factory work, makes a significant contribution in "schooling" men in modern attitudes and in teaching them to act like modern men. Those who come from very traditional backgrounds and receive little formal schooling can, under the right circumstances,...

Data from a comparative study of 5,450 young males in six developing nations were used to investigate the association between modernization or modernity and negative attitudes toward aging. The findings question the frequent assertion that "modernity" (the exposure of individuals in developing nations to industrial technology and urban social experience) results in negative perceptions of aging and diminished value attributed to the aged. The data do provide support for the hypothesis that "modernization" (societal development) is related to negative perceptions of aging. Results suggest the necessity of differentiating between "modernization" and "modernity" as levels of analysis and of avoiding value-laden assumptions concerning advantages of either traditional or industrial social settings with respect to the position of elders.

Attitudinal modernity may be defined as a set of attitudes, beliefs, behavior, etc. especially characterizing persons in highly urbanized, highly industrialized, and highly educated social settings. Over 150 interview items attempting to measure modernity so defined were administered as part of a four hour interview to 5,500 men from 6 different developing countries-Argentina, Chile, India, Pakistan, Israel and Nigeria. Using a subset of 119 strictly attitudinal items, the present paper attempts to derive a simple, comparative, overall measure of the modernity of individuals. The resulting measure was called "OM," standing for "Overall Modernity." Two major types of OM measures were derived, one using item analysis methods and one using criterion group methods. The final short OM scale suggested consists of items meeting both selection procedures simultaneously.