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Administered identical questionnaires to high school students (N=570) in 1963, 1976, and 1982. While educational, career, and financial concerns were more parent-oriented, almost all social activities were peer-oriented. Strength of the orientation fluctuated over the years with teenagers in 1963 showing lowest peer orientation and teenagers in 1976 showing highest. (Author/NB)

Two comparable random samples of 100 high school students each were given the opportunity to respond to open-ended questions about what makes for a popular teenager and what makes for an "oddball" or "square." The importance attached to being popular in the high school crowd seems to have been modified little over the 16-year time period. (Author/RH)

Longitudinal investigation into teenagers' reference groups revealed a consistency as to which kind of issue prompts peer orientation and which question results in parent consultation. The most important finding indicates a shift from parent to peer orientation over the past 16 years. (Author/DB)

Nazi ideology redefined the witches persecuted during the 16th and 17th centuries as followers of Celto-Germanic Nature Religion. SS-Reichsfuhrer Himmier formed a Hexen-Sonderkommando to carry out an archival survey of witch trials, resulting in the Kartoteka, a file system comprising over 30,000 cases. This paper examines the ideological background, the structure and method of survey, the quality of the file by going back to original sources in the bishopric of Bamberg, and provides a statistical summary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The peasant traditions of Franconia included a belief in a system of black witchcraft that functioned as a personal and egalitarian judicial system and represented an alternative to the official legal system. It offered justice to all members of the community, independent of social or material power. Since witchery was never aimed at random but was a focused tool used to punish those who wronged, it encouraged people to be honest, polite, and helpful. Hence it contributed to social justice and order and functioned as the salvation of the underdog. The belief that the poor, the destitute, and the aged could, if treated unkindly, retaliate with witchery, was an effective protection for these otherwise powerless members of the community. For a number of reasons, this system of folk justice has almost disappeared from the villages of Franconia (only the elders invest belief and respect in it), and its description is of theoretical and historical value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The village elders of Franconian Switzerland, a province in central Germany, respect a tradition of witchcraft. Inquiry was by participant observation, because the author was born and raised in the peasant society, speaks the dialect, and has access to informants, many of whom are members of his clan. Findings are discussed in a functional framework modified by an activist model. The research corroborates a number of established elements of witchcraft and also reveals a number of unique features, including conterminousness of belief and isolated geographic condition, strict polarization of healer and witch, suppression of crime through fear of witchery, preponderance of married over unmarried women dabbling in witchery, and the rapid shift from trusting supernatural forces to trusting scientific- technological forces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]