Self-Attitudes by Age, Sex, and Professional Training.

The major purpose in this article, according to the author is to report on the range of areas covered by the responses to self-evaluation test, and of course to make a report on whatever is presently available regarding differences in this range by several social categories. In order to provide information of a systematic and inclusive sort, more than two hundred student protocols were content-analyzed by the method of successive combination into more general categories. It was found that locus increased with age; that within the age bracket represented by groups, sex references increased with age. Result indicated that females more frequently and saliently than males identified themselves by sex and kin and less frequently by race than did males. Occupational identity increased with years of professional training, and, within one professional school, nursing, and locus scores increased with years of training. Finally, an over-all content analysis of responses from students in four professional schools and from members of one professional group indicated marked differences in social anchorage, reference to ideology, identity in terms of intention or ambition, and the amount and nature of self-evaluations.