SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH COUNCIL

VOLUME 23 NUMBER 2 JUNE 1969 230 PARK AVENUE· NEW YORK, N.Y. 10017

LANGUAGE AS OBSTACLE AND AS DATA IN SOCIOLOGICAL RESEARCH

LINGUISTIC and other intergroup differences in com­municative behavior, previously regarded simply as obstacles to cross-cultural research, have lately come to be increasingly recognized as an important but hitherto largely unexploited kind of sociological data. Under the auspices of the Council's Committee on Sociolin­guistics, these two aspects were explored at a small con­ference of linguists and social scientists held in San Francisco, November 25-26, 1968.

~ One of the reasons for the conference was the de­_ sirability of discussion of the fact that linguistic factors

narrowly defined are closely intertwined with other factors conditioning communication. The participants therefore undertook broader consideration of the pro­cess of eliciting and interpreting verbal information, touching, for example, on the problem of categorizing "don't know" responses to questions and on different codes of polite behavior as pitfalls in the search for comparable data.

The participants in the conference included anthro­pologists, a psychologist, and sociologists, more than half of whom had been trained in linguistics.1 Four principal topics were discussed: (1) the ethnography of asking

• The author is Professor of Sociology, Indiana University. As a member of the Council's Committee on Sociolinguistics he was re­sponsible for organizing the conference on which he reports here. He wishes to thank Aaron V. Cicourel, Irwin Deutscher, Susan Ervin­Tripp, John J. Gumperz, and Dell Hymes for extensive critical com­mentary on drafts of this report but observes that, since the partici­pants in the conference could not always agree, the report (which here has been much condensed for reasons of space) can be considered neither a completely accurate record of the meeting nor a definitive statement of the problems and prospects of an area of scholarly activity. Thanks are also due Kathleen George for bibliographic and editorial assistance.

1 Committee members in attendance included Susan Ervin-Tripp, Allen D. Grimshaw, John J. Gumperz, Dell Hymes, and Elbridge Sibley, staff. The other participants were R. Bruce Anderson, Duke University; Aaron V. Cicourel, University of California, Santa Barbara;

by Allen D. Grimshaw-

questions; (2) the meaning of words-particularly as in­fluenced by social and linguistic contexts; (3) the use of linguistic and social data from research on the preceding two topics in developing theories and methods in the sev­eral disciplines; (4) the mobilization of educational and research resources to correct some shortcomings of cur­rent research which were believed to be a consequence of failure to incorporate knowledge about the preceding topics into contemporary scholarship. It was generally agreed that investigators in these areas ought to be persuaded that some of their "incidental findings" are necessary building blocks for general theories of com­munication and other social behavior.

What follows is only a sampling of the range of sub­jects and ideas covered in the course of the conference, with no attempt to assign credit for specific ideas. A more extensive record of the conference may be avail­able at a later date.

ETHNOGRAPHY OF ASKING QUESTIONS

Middle-class white Americans are accustomed to answering questions, to being interrogated by family, friends, and strangers; to being tested and measured, surveyed and polled; to filling out forms. As one partici­pant suggested, "They carry around responding skills

Irwin Deutscher, Case Western Reserve University; and Herbert P. Phillips, University of California, Berkeley. Several other scholars provided copies of pertinent unpublished papers for use at the con­ference. Most of the participants have had field experience in which they employed formal questionnaire techniques, supplemented by participant observation. (The field sites represented include Argentina, Denmark, India, Norway, Thailand, Northwest and Southwest Ameri­can Indian communities, and a variety of subcultural settings in the United States.) This experience enabled participants to judge com­munication problems by taking the points of view of native informants as well as of social scientists.

17

so that they can accommodate their responses to the response categories available." Our questions, however, may be variously insulting, threatening, humorous or boorish, or simply meaningless to participants in other cultures (or subcultures in our own society). Or ques­tions we deem legitimate may go beyond the bounds of propriety, legitimately expected knowledge, or even hypothetical contemplation-to others. There are, as a matter of fact, societies in which questioning behavior among unrelated adults is not tolerated or where it is an egregious insult to ask an adult to repeat a statement. In many societies, moreover, only individuals to whom certain roles are assigned, such as mothers or priests, can legitimately provide information about their own roles. On the other hand, Garfinkel observes that a cul­ture may require persons to talk about, label, or be able to report certain kinds of behavior or events.2

It is often assumed that there are three quite discrete types of sentences--declarative, interrogative, and im­perative-which serve respectively the social functions of giving information, asking questions, and issuing commands. But that assumption can be incorrect in any society and in some it frequently is. Furthermore, agreement as to what grammatical form serves what in­tended behavioral consequence varies in different com­munities and, within communities, with the context of the speech event. In polite American middle-class so­ciety some interrogative sentences are variously intended as requests, polite instructions, or undeniable demands. Some questions, of course, are rhetorical; and such a sen­tence as "My, isn't it cold in here?" is variously inter­preted as a statement, a. question, a command to close a window, or simply as a time-filling and contentless ritual. Questions can be asked about retrospective, im­mediate, or anticipated events-possible, unlikely, or even impossible; about one's own behavior or that of others; about one's own attitudes or ideas, or those of others. Examples of these sorts of questions are:

1. "When did you learn to read?" (about a probable actual event)

2. "What would you do if your six-year-old child ran away?" (about a possible hypothetical event)

3. "What would you do if you were President?" (about an un· likely [for most people] hypothetical event)

4. "How satisfied are you with your life?" (about a personal attitudinal set)

5. "How do you feel about the X party?" (about an ideological set)

6. "How are things going?" (nonquestion ritual).

This list is not exhaustive. These and other types of questions are asked by English-speaking natives of the

~ Harold Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology, Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1967.

18

United States. Not all these types of questions are asked of all adults in all societies; some are asked of no adults in some societies; or some types are expected to be asked by some adults and other types by others. _

Questions are asked in social contexts, by and of inter- _ locutors with different social characteristics, and via utterances that can be coded linguistically. Standard trea-tises on interviewing warn about the dangers of cross­class and cross-subcultural interviews, but they do not adequately consider the fact that there are respondents who cannot (in their own culture) legitimately be ex­pected to have opinions or information on certain items. They do not mention the strains generated when stan­dard speakers who consider dialects to be "obscene" inter­view those who speak them, nor discuss the equally disastrous consequences of spuriously and incorrectly imitating lower-status speech. In view of these oversights it is not surprising that such research manuals give little, if any, attention to the ways in which sequencing and other behavioral strategies identify sentences as state­ments, requests, questions, and so on. Finally, and par­ticularly in prescribing techniques for schedule and questionnaire construction, they seldom take account of the fact that interrogative sentences are embedded in a context of other sentences which may influence the meanings intended and perceived. In short, they attend neither to the realities of differentiated systems of inter­rogative behavior nor to the necessity of developing e theories for the adequate and correct interpretation of utterances.

Such a theory would concern, minimally, social norms for the maintenance of interpersonal boundaries in dis­course--defining the proper initiation, carrying on, and termination of interrogative interaction. Are there, for example, what Harvey Sacks has called "tickets" for the initiation of interaction with strangers? What linguistic or other violations disrupt interaction once initiated? In our society interaction may be disrupted if an inter­locutor demands explicitness when shared meanings should be assumed, or offers it when it implies that the other person has not the wit to understand. Thus far, only a few ethnographic semanticists have begun to work on systematic ways of finding out ethnographically how to ask proper questions.s One outcome of the con-

8 As, for example, when Duane Metzger and Gerald E. Williams state ("Some Procedures and Results in the Study of Native Categories: Tzeltal 'Firewood,''' American Anthropologist, April 1966, pp. 389-407) that they wish to identify "classificatory differences significant to informants rather than to the investigators." See also their "A Formal Ethnographic Analysis of Tenejapa Ladino Weddings," ibid., October 1963, pp. 1076-II0I. For another approach see Charles O. Frake, "The Diagnosis of Disease among the Subanun of Mindanao," ibid., February _ 1961, pp. II 3-132, and "Notes on Queries in Ethnography," in A. WI Kimball Romney and R. G. D'Andrade, eds., "Transcultural Studies in Cognition," ibid., June 1964, Part 2, pp. 182-145.

VOLUME 23, NUMBER 2

ference is heightened awareness of the importance of an ethnography of interrogative behavior for each and every social research project, and of the ultimate need for a general theory of universal rules for obtaining information.4

MEANING OF WORDS, PHRASES, SENTENCES, AND SETS OF SENTENCES

Several kinds of differences of meaning are highly valuable as social data as well as being an obstacle to understanding. There are, of course, difficulties of vary­ing degree in translating single words across languages; most undergraduates know about the problems of find­ing equivalents for verstehen or sympatico. But within a single language community there can be quite dif­ferent meanings for the same word-meanings change over time (even within the span of a single interaction), across subcultural groups, and also as a result of shifts in topic or setting in interaction involving only mem­bers of the same subgroups. Even single words within languages and within cultural subgroups (or even stable dyads) can have wide ranges of both cognitive and ex­pressive meanings. In a superb study of the Russian novel Friedrich has shown that both objective informa­tion on status relations and very profound subjective expression were conveyed by the selection of one or another personal pronoun.5 In English, which does not have the tu-vous distinction, we are all familiar with how the meaning of the address term "Sir" can vary with social context and, in a given social context, with lin­guistic context, intonation, and so on. These problems are subtly different from those of alternative denotations of a given word, e.g., chair in "I had the chair."

The problem of meaning has been attacked mainly by three methods: use of the semantic differential,6 back translation,7 and componential analysis.s The first of

'For some beginnings in this direction see Aaron V. Cicourel, "The Acquisition of Social Structure: Towards a Developmental Sociology of Language and Meaning," in Jack Douglas, ed., Existential Society, New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, in press.

5 Paul Friedrich, "Structural Implications of Russian Pronominal Usage," in William Bright, ed., Sociolinguistics: Proceedings of the UCLA Sociolinguistics Conference, 1964, The Hague: Mouton and Co., 1966, pp. 214-259. For more general treatment see Roger Brown and Albert Gilman, "The Pronouns of Power and Solidarity," in Thomas A. Sebeok, ed., Style in Language, Cambridge: Technology Press, and New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1960, pp. 253-276.

6 Charles E. Osgood, George J. Suci, and Percy A. Tannenbaum, The Measurement of Meaning, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1964; Charles E. Osgood, "Semantic Differential Technique in the Comparative Study of Cultures," in A. Kimball Romney and R. G. D'Andrade, eds., op. cit., pp. 171-200.

7 Herbert P. Phillips, "Problems of Translation and Meaning in Field Work," Human Organization, Winter 1 95!H50, pp. 184-192.

8 See, e.g., Ward H. Goodenough, "On Componential Analysis and the StUdy of Meaning," Language, January - March 1956, pp. 195-216,

JUNE 1969

these is the technique that has been most widely used in attempts to isolate the "meaning" of individual words-­to identify their qualities, the emotional and subjective connotations of strength or weakness, warmth or cold­ness, friendliness or unfriendliness. The semantic differ­ential is not used to look for the cognitive boundaries of terms, nor to specify how the same word, when em­bedded in different sentences or used by different peo­ple in different social settings, may have quite different expressive meaning. Interest appears to be in the indi­vidual words themselves and their differentiation. There has been little concern with applications of this tech­nique either in the improvement of cross-language or cross-cultural social research or in the use of results of such analysis for answering sociological questions.

Clyde Kluckhohn, in his delightful Mirror for Man,9 presents a piquant example of back translation. The phrase "Genevieve suspended for prank" is translated into Japanese; it re-emerges in English, "Genevieve hanged for juvenile delinquency." We are not told where the error appeared nor how Japanese readers would have understood Genevieve to have been pun­ished. The Londons, in their examination of the ques­tionnaire administered to refugees in the Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System, have shown how the use of one word, kar'era (career), with unanticipated negative implications in the Soviet context, resulted in highly questionable findings. lO

Back translation presents some obvious problems of reliability.ll Some of them can be reduced by successive iterations by different translators. More satisfactory reliability, however, provides no assurance that ques­tions are valid-initially, in translation, in retransla­tion, or in interpretation.12 Standard stimuli simply do not exist-and this is as true of research across class or color boundaries in the United States as of research across languages or societies. In part, this is because questions do not exist in isolation; every question is linked to every other question, and immediately adja­cent questions may have quite different influences in

and Eugene A. Hammel, ed., "Formal Semantics," American Anthro­pologist, October 1965, Part 2.

9 New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1949. 10 Ivan D. London and Miriam B. London, "A Research-Examination

of the Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System," Psychological Reports, December 1966, Part 2, pp. 1011-1109.

11 For an early discussion of some of the theoretical problems of back translation, see Susan M. Ervin, "Information Transmission and Code Translation," in Charles E. Osgood and Thomas A. Sebeok, eds., PsycllOlinguistics, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1965, pp. 185-192 (originally published in 1954).

12 For a timely commentary on reliability and validity, see Irwin Deutscher, "Looking Backward: Case Studies on the Progress of Methodology in Sociological Research," American Sociologist, February 1969, pp. 35-41.

19

different languages or cultures. If the semantic differen­tial has been limited because it has been directed to in­dividual words, the technique of back translation is limited if it is applied only to single sentences. It is clear that we need to know more about how sentences are linked-and interimplicated. Perhaps linguistic analy­sis should transcend sentence boundaries. There are clues here both for the creation of more valid research instruments and for more intelligent and more broadly productive interpretation of answers to questions asked in social research.

Attention at the conference turned to ways in which componential analysis might be extended to include more specifically sociolinguistic concerns, and the tech­niques adapted to problems of research across social categories. The terms used in componential analysis­domains, sets, dimensions, components-have clear and simple definitions: domain refers to natively relevant contrasts; a set consists of all those words that legiti­mately can be substituted in a phrase or sentence; dimensions and components have their usual meanings. The methodology of componential analysis is quite straightforward. Its purpose is to isolate natively rele­vant contrasts and to identify relationships among dif­ferent usages-to uncover the patterned character of cultural systems-whether systems of linguistic behavior or of kin labeling. In the case of the identification of complex components (or features), a considerable amount of ethnographic work may be involved. In at­tempting to obtain a usable definition of the extended family in India, for example, it is necessary to ask several questions of a number of people in vari­ous places. In one area a shared hearth may be of cultural importance; in another, the sharing of complex and complementary ritual obligations; in still another, financial aid to even very distant kin may be salient. Whatever local specialization there may be, however, some common core of explicit connotations and implicit understandings can be discerned deeply embedded within the patterns of local variations. The aim of componential analysis is the specification of this com­mon core.

This specification can be valuable to the sociolin­guistically oriented scholar in three ways. First, through laying bare the mutual implications of cultural mean­ings and linguistic usages, it provides an approach to the complex causal relationships between language structure and social structure-between speech behavior and other social behavior.ls Second, it provides data

18 For a review of some perspectives on these causal relationships (adapted from Dell Hymes) see Allen Grimshaw, "Sociolinguistics," in Wilbur Schramm et al., eds., Handbook of Communication, Chicago: Rand McNally &: Company. in press.

20

for simple studies of linguistic behavior and its social structural correlates, in which speech usages can be analyzed, for example, to identify class characteristics, without concern over causal priority. Finally, by show­ing that cultural meanings cannot be taken, semantically uncontaminated, out of either componential domains or social contexts, it can help us both to ask questions and to interpret responses more intelligently. Com­ponential analysis may seem, to the uninitiated, to be arcane. It is not magical. It will not enable the investi­gator to ask questions, across languages or cultures, which are simultaneously phenomenally identical and conceptually equivalent. It will indicate sources of error and it will permit a probing into valid meanings which has not characterized prior research.

Partly because every question is related to all other questions, standard interpretations of similar responses are hazardous: all responses in an interrogatory inter­action are linked. It may be possible to localize individ­ual questions and responses so that variable conditions and effects can be isolated. We have no evidence that this is true. We do have reason to believe that treatment of questions and responses that are similar in form as if they were semantically equivalent is dangerous indeed.14

ETHNOLOGY OF ASKING QUESTIONS AND SOCIOLINGUISTIC DATA

To almost any question some respondents answer "don't know" or some equivalent. Typically, such responses are excluded from cross-tabulations, with or without mention of this exclusion in the explanatory text. A somewhat more sophisticated practice is to identify those categories of respondents who frequently answer "don't know" across items and to characterize them, collectively, as "ill-informed" or "noncoopera­tive." There are few attempts to discern patterns in which some respondents answer "don't know" to one set of items and others, to a different. set.15 There is seldom an attempt to discover whether there may be

14 During the conference Aaron Cicourel was asked what differences there would be in results if he were to redo the fertili ty studies by Kurt Back and J. Mayone Stycos or those by Judith Blake, using his research techniques, or if they were to do studies in the Argentine, using their own. His response was that there would probably be little difference in the tables produced, but he believed he would have a different understanding of the meaning of entries in the tables, and more information on how to link demographic studies to more general theories of social in teraction.

15 Robert E. Mitchell ("Survey Materials Collected in the Developing Countries: Sampling, Measurement, and Interviewing Obstacles to Intra- and Inter-National Comparisons," International Social Science Journal, 1965, pp. 665~B5) identifies differences between Chinese minorities and indigenous groups in Southeast Asia by comparing questions on which differential frequencies of "don't know" and "no

VOLUME 23, NUMBER 2

I

some items, for example, which elicit "don't know" from respondents of high socioeconomic status who would seem to be better equipped to respond, while those less well equipped give a substantive answer. A straightforward "don't know" may reflect unwillingness to go beyond known information, or it may mean some­thing quite different. But all too frequently such re­sponses are not recognized as a rich source of data, nor are systematic attempts made to reduce the ambiguities in research design which may have elicited them.

Whether working with survey data or with more extensive clinical materials, social scientists like to have "clean" data. They tend to forget that the interview it­self is a part of the data. Instead, they aim to eliminate the variability of human response in order to standardize data. Homogenization, however, entails a loss of in­formation. Procedures through which data are collapsed into manageable numbers of categories should be made explicit, so that lost data can be recovered and findings can be better interpreted.

Social scientists, who have long been concerned pri­marily with variables, have recently begun to tum their attention to constants, searching for possible social in­teractional equivalents of linguistic universals. It may be that universal patterns of behavior will be discovered through the identification of some social analog to the deep structure of language. Likewise, a componential analysis of interaction as it is revealed by speech may provide clues to persistencies and uniformities in human exchange. Without specifying how this search might most profitably be conducted, the participants in the conference agreed that it should be pursued by studying language behavior.

PROGRAMMATIC CONSIDERATIONS AND ADDITIONAL QUESTIONS

The participants agreed that almost all contemporary social science research would be improved by much more careful attention to ethnographies of interrogation, and that analyses and interpretations based on current re­search are often highly problematic. There was less agreement on the most effective way to introduce to practicing scholars and the generation of students now being trained the kinds of considerations suggested in the preceding pages--and to induce them to change

answer" appear. This is rare, as is Mitchell's demonstration that some survey analysts are fully aware of the range of problems confronting cross·societal survey workers. Unfortunately, solutions to some of the problems are not so simple as he suggests.

JUNE 1969

their ways. The observation was made, more than once, that "establishment social science" has a substantial investment in doing things as they are now done (i.e., not treating current practices as data to be studied, per se), and that demands for the specification of how data are collected and interpreted would be regarded in some quarters as lese-majeste or, at best, a bothersome incon­venience.

Social scientists must learn to incorporate such specifi­cation into their work and to report the ethnographic procedures they followed in arriving at such specifica­tion. Reference has already been made to the need for study of the interview itself-including research on data resulting from the use of different types of inter­views (and interviewers) in different kinds of com­munities. One suggestion made at the conference was that previous research, particularly survey studies, should be re-examined with a view to isolation of the sociolinguistic factors that produce different data from questions and procedures that are intended to be identi­cal. Studies of characteristics of interviewer, respondent, translator, and coder as they interact to place one re­action to a query in one category and others in others are greatly needed.

We simply do not know how to phrase questions that will be meaningful to random samples of diversified populations. We suspect that fixed-choice questions should never be used in comparative studies. Since those who use them have not systematically examined the possibly resulting biases, however, we have no way of estimating the magnitude or direction of errors that are thereby introduced. Preliminary ethnographic work might reduce the possibility of asking needlessly sensi­tive and hurting questions, but we have not learned to define studied populations as publics. We state (in discussions of collaboration with indigenous scholars) that access and understanding should both be aspects of research strategy. But we simultaneously make access problematic by failing to find out what the questions we are asking may mean in context, and deny ourselves understanding by considering single sentences in isola­tion in designing research instruments.

Social scientists must ask themselves some serious questions about how wisely they ask questions of their research subjects. Otherwise, continuing refinements in quantitative analysis of data will produce only spurious or at best marginal increments of socially and sociologi­cally relevant data. Participants in the San Francisco meeting are convinced that questions can be improved and answers more intelligently interpreted.

21

SUMMER WORKSHOPS IN SOCIOLINGUISTICS: RESEARCH ON CHILDREN'S ACQUISITION OF COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE

DURING the past four years, a research group at the University of California, Berkeley, has been studying children's language acquisition in a variety of cultures. The Council's Committee on Sociolinguistics, because of its concern that most earlier research on such learning had largely neglected the processes by which children learn not simply the grammar and phonetics of a language, but when and how-in different social con­texts-to use it, encouraged the group to extend the scope of its project both geographically and substan­tively, to include field studies in several different areas of the world and to investigate the broader aspects of learning implied in the term "acquisition of communi­cative competence." Thus the group has been concerned with three aspects of that subject: (1) What features of phonological, grammatical, and semantic development seem to be universal? What features can be related to special structures in particular languages? (2) What are the patterns of development in various social uses of language? How early and in what forms do sociolin­guistic rules appear? (3) What are the relations between the social organization of the community, values about language and its uses, and how the child is spoken to and rewarded for speaking?

In this project my collaborators have been John Gumperz, anthropologist and linguist, Dan Slobin, psy­cholinguist, and a group of advanced graduate students who participated in preparation of a preliminary Field Manual to guide their joint efforts in sites around the world.1 The first fruits of this research appeared in the summer of 1968 in the data and experience brought back by these students, who had attempted to apply the

• The author is Professor of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley, and a member of the Council's Committee on SociOlinguistics. With her colleagues John J. Gumperz, Professor of Anthropology, also a member of the committee, and Dan I. Slobin, Associate Professor of Psychology, she has been engaged for some time in research on chil­dren's language learning and in preparation of a manual of field study methods. With funds granted to the Council by the National Science Foundation (Grant Nos. GS-1241, GS-1919, and GZ-994) for the com­mittee's program, support was provided for field work in 196fHiB by predoctoral students associated with the project. The summer work­shops described here were cosponsored by the committee and partially supported by its funds. Part of the present report will appear as "The Acquisition of Communicative Competence by Children in Different Cultures," in Proceedings of the Eighth International Congress of Ethnological and Anthropological Sciences, in press.

1 Dan I. Slobin, ed., Field Manual tor Cross-Cultural Study of the Acquisition of Communicative Competence, University of California, Berkeley, ASUC Store, 1967.

22

by Susan Ervin-Tripp ,.

tests in the manual while living in foreign cultures as participant observers for a year or more after completion of their formal anthropological and linguistic training.

The summer program consisted of four workshops, each restricted to 8 participants: one on child grammar, conducted by Slobin; two on sociolinguistics, conducted by Ervin-Tripp and Gumperz; and one on child phonology, conducted by Charles Ferguson of Stanford University (chairman of the Committee on Sociolin­guistics). The sociolinguistics groups were particularly concerned with problems in assessing beliefs about lan­guage, studying code-switching, discovering sociolin­guistic rules, and determining the social meaning of speech variation. Their purpose was to integrate micro­sociolinguistics by relating the insights of generative grammar to social interaction theory, in the context of specific research problems.

The workshop participants included 32 pre- and post­doctoral students with backgrounds in linguistics and the social sciences. Among these were seven who had recently returned from making field studies, guided by the Field Manual which had also been used by the direc­tors of the workshops in their own research.2 The seven field workers visited the various workshops when called upon, to discuss their experience in the field and problems encountered in collecting and analyzing data. A number of distinguished visiting scholars took part for one to three weeks in the workshops; some of them also gave public lectures.s The workshop participants

2 The seven students who had completed field work prior to the summer session and the sites of their research were: Ben Blount, Kenya; Jan Brukman, India; Keith Kernan, Samoa; Claudia Mitchell Kernan, California (blacks) ; Brian Stross, Mexico; Rodney Vlasek. Nigeria; Carolyn Wardrip, California (whites). Also participating in the workshops were David Argoff who was about to begin research in Finland on Russian-Finnish bilinguals, and Edward Hernandez, on Mexican-American bilinguals. Funds for the field work of Messrs. Argoff and Brukman, Mrs. Kernan, and Miss Wardrip had been pro­vided from the committee's research budget; the others were supported by other agencies. A training grant from the National Science Founda­tion enabled the following students from various universities to at­tend the workshops before undertaking field work: Kay Atkinson, Mary Ann Campbell, Ronald W. Casson, Sybillyn J. Mehan. P. David Pavy, III, Diana J. Risen, James N. Schenkein, Abigail B. Sher. Sandra M. Storm, and Merrill K. Swain.

S Public lectures were given on child language, by Edward Klima and Martin Braine; on social factors entering into diversity of language and its use, by Basil Bernstein, Vera John, and Courtney Cazden; on cross·cultural studies of affective meaning, by Leon Jakobovits; on units in natural conversation, by Emanuel Schegloff; and on com­municative competence, by Dell Hymes. Besides their visits, the work-

VOLUME 23, NUMBER 2

I

were offered courses in the regular summer program of the University, according to the convenience of the relevant departments. These courses included trans­formational grammar, phonetics, child language, lan­guage and society, and language and the individual.

The actual operation of the summer program was somewhat different than we had expected. The most conspicuous change was in the composition of the work­shops. The original restriction of each to 8 students was based on the belief that a larger group would work less efficiently. However, many more students were per­mitted to audit the workshops, and the effect was to alter .completely the nature of the groups, to inhibit the participation of some members, and to convert the ses­sions from workshops into lectures or large seminars. In any such training program there is of course a pain­ful choice to be made between the benefits of added ex­posure of "extra" participants to the ideas discussed by each group, and the deeper analysis and freer inter­change possible in small groups of persons with greater commitment. In the end, one workshop group voted to meet secretly to make the latter choice possible.

The workshops accomplished somewhat less analysis of field data than we had anticipated. I believe three factors were responsible. One was of course the structure of the workshops, which became in some cases, depend­ing on the number in attendance and the diversity of disciplines represented, general forums for theoretical argument. A second factor was the series of very stimu­lating visitors, each of whom discussed his own material. Their visits inevitably disrupted somewhat the con­tinuity of work and also attracted additional auditors. Least controllable was the fact that many of the data were not yet in a form to be analyzed, since the workers had just returned from the field and had not reduced their tapes to transcriptions or even catalogued ade­quately the sociolinguistic data scattered through the tapes. Those topics for which quite specific tests were proposed in the manual-e.g., babbling and imitations -presented the least difficulties for profitable workshop use. The field workers have concluded that there would have been advantages in postponing the summer session for a year to give them time to gain greater control over their materials.

Papers written during the summer included research proposals, further reports on projects already begun,

shops profited from visits of Harvey Sacks and Aaron Cicourel, who are concerned with the study of natural conversation, and Ursula Bellugi· Klima and Carlota Smith, who have studied children's language. Daniel Dato reported on his studies of the grammatical structure of compe­tence in bilingual children; William Ceohegan, on the structure of address rules; Wick Miller and Roger Shuy, on sociolinguistic field work; John Ross, on new developments in linguistic theory. Erving Coffman joined the group to analyze filmed interaction.

JUNE 1969

and analysis of the data collected by others. From thes~ papers 4 and the discussions, the issues considered in the workshops will next be illustrated.

The first area of concern, traditional structural de­velopment, has the longest and richest history, but we wished to extend know ledge of the variety of language structures. The field workers found that the earliest sentences in English, Luo, and Samoan are so similar in structure and content as to seem like translations. The most interesting test for these early fixed-order sentences was Finnish, since the adult model has free word order. Melissa Bowerman, a graduate student at Harvard University, found that one Finnish-speaking child, before he used suffixes, invented a fixed-order rule, and another invented fixed order in the one place where it mattered for ambiguity-in subject-verb-object sentences.

When samples of children's babbling in Chinese, Russian, and English were compared, judges could not differentiate them,5 which does not, of course, rule out the possibility that differences are objectively present. Furthermore, some of the well-accepted generalizations about phonological development did not hold true in detailed cases. From the very earliest stages of language development, we could find evidence of style shifting for different addressees and different social contexts, usually in the form of whispering vs. shouting, or intonational variation. These variations are the early features enter­ing into sociolinguistic rules.

SOCIAL USES OF LANGUAGE

The social uses of language by children or adults could be examined in two ways. One is with reference to a psychological system of categories of motive or intent, such as playing with sounds and patterns, obtaining goods and services from others, and so on; the other is in terms of categories-within the culture of the child or of the adult-of speech events, episodes, and speech acts. A marriage ceremony, a conference, judicial trial, dramatic performance, or alphabet game is a speech event with identifiable components and rules. To quali­fy as a native speaker in a speech community one must learn to behave as though one knew these rules. Episodes or discourse stages are unified by participants, topic, and focus, for example, a story embedded in a conversation, a set of toasts at a bridal dinner, an exchange of vows in a wedding ceremony. Speech acts are the briefest com-

~ The papers have been made available under their titles through the Educational Research Information Center system at the Center for Applied Linguistics as Working Papers of the Language-Behavior Research Laboratory.

5 "An Experiment on the Recognition of Babbling," by Kay Atkinson, Brian MacWhinney, and Caroline Stoel.

25

ponents in episodes: included are requests, commands, greetings, farewells, apologies, introductions, and ex­pressions of thanks.6

We would like to know what uses of language exist in children's cultures, which uses are derived from inter­action with adults, what the structure of speech events appears to be to children, and what rules of social dis­tribution speech events may have, i.e., when they should occur and who the participants should be.

Examples of "affirmation, testing truthfulness, bets, bargain making, swapping, giving, gaining possession, claiming precedence, avoiding, secret keeping, and obtaining respite" were found by the Opies in their research on the oral tradition of children in Great Britain,7 but whether these exist as ethnological cate­gories, and the rules for their use remain to be studied in specific face-to-face groups. In the Oakland black com­munity studied by Claudia Mitchell Kernan, children were-as others have noted about urban black children -very verbal and concerned with verbal skills. From the age of two they knew a rich collection of nursery rhymes and songs, and at older ages engaged in such verbal play as alphabet games, poems, stories, riddles, and role­playing games. Taunts were used for group definition. Young children already knew about a form of insult called "sounding," although they produced simplified versions of it, and did not until adolescence become adept at the more complex and subtle verbal insult game called "the dozens" or "signifying." 8

Numerous instances of role playing reveal that both routines and speech features may identify roles. For example, it was found that four-year-oIds know that the term "honey" belongs to mothers. In Oakland a nine-year-old "doctor" said to his patient, "What about -about what, young man?" The child knew that a doc­tor speaking to his patient uses formal English. Even the youngest children use baby talk features in addressing infants. However, these styles lack internal coherence and tend to appear fleetingly as role markers rather than with the consistency of adult styles.

The kinds of sociolinguistic rules we examined in­clude, first, those in which social features govern the selection of linguistic alternatives, for instance, deferen-

6 For further discussion of sociolinguistic concepts, see John J. Gumperz and Dell Hymes, eds., "The Ethnography of Communica­tion," American Anthropologist, Vol. 6, Part 2, 1964; Hymes and Gumperz, Directions in Sociolinguistics, New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, in press; Susan Ervin-Tripp, "Sociolinguistics" in L. Berko­witz, ed., Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, Vol. 4, New York: Academic Press, in press.

710na Opie and Peter Opie, The Lore and Language of School Children, New York: Oxford University Press, 1967, Chap. 8.

B A full report on the verbal skills found among the Oakland chil­dren will appear in Mrs. Kernan's doctoral dissertation (University of California, Berkeley).

24

tial style to some addressees, colloquial style to others, English to one set, Spanish to specific others. William Geohegan's comparison of address structures of Samal speakers in the Philippines suggests that the number of social features which are involved and the size of the repertoire of alternatives both change even after age 12.9 A paper by Ronald Casson describes in detail how the study of kin terms of address and reference can help to define relevant social features and examine the social meaning of alternations.

We are concerned, second, with the internal structure of these systems of alternation. How early do children learn to use a uniform formal style, a narrative style, the separation of two languages? Edward Hernandez found phonological separation of languages in three­year-old Mexican Americans, but in Claudia Kernan's role-shifting data the "co-occurrence rules" seem much less strict. It is as though a few stereotyped features are used to mark the role, but the children resume un­marked normal speech readily.

Third, we are concerned with sequences within speech events as formal structures that children must learn. They do, of course, learn sequences in games quite early. A simple example of "boundary marking" is that greet­ings come first on encountering someone. We might expect that the most conspicuous frames for speech events, such as changes in personnel, might be most easily identified by children and be communicated earli­est in their rules of sequence. In each of these three kinds of sociolinguistic rules, we are concerned with their productivity-that is, with their effect on the child's ability to behave appropriately without explicit instruction or without imitation; this provides some evidence that he perceives the appropriate social fea­tures of the addressee or situation, and that he knows the linguistic patterns required.

INFLUENCES OF ADULTS ON CHILDREN'S SPEECH

We also examined the effects of the milieu of the child on the rate and type of his language development. The most concrete results were presented by Kerry Drach, Ben Kobashigawa, Carol Pfuderer, and Dan Slobin in a series of papers on the linguistic structure of speech to children. There has been considerable discussion about how children can handle complex and "degenerate" linguistic material. However, the workshop analyses of data from Cambridge and Oakland samples of speech to children by adults and other children suggest a dramatic characterization of the style used in addressing children.

9 A detailed report will be included in his dissertation (Stanford University).

VOLUME 23, NUMBER 2

I

,

It is brief, highly repetitive, syntactically simple, lacks hesitations and false starts, has few subordinate clauses, and abounds in questions and imperatives encouraging response. The frequency of basic syntactic devices is sufficiently similar in the different samples to suggest a common adaptation to child addressees, although speakers varied somewhat in ability to adjust their style to the changing competence of children as they grow older. We have made this analysis only for English, and do not know whether there are similar features in speech addressed to infants in other languages.

While the structure of speech to children may be simi­lar in different social groups, there may be quite dif­ferent uses of language in different families. In this field the most fully developed research has been done in England by Basil Bernstein and his collaborators, who have recently completed a detailed study of the relations between adult communicative needs and values, prac­tices toward children, and children's speech. He has argued that the uses of communication, for example in adult occupations, may vary widely and systematically. These in tum affect what adults value in children's speech, what uses they stimulate, what kinds of appeals they make to children during socialization, and so on. For example, if parents allow children to talk about the reasons for an act, from an early age the children may be rewarded for verbal persuasion. In contrast, families in which behavior is in accordance with status-specific rules or power and authority alone do not stimulate simi­lar uses of language. In the children's speech studied there were considerable differences in the elaboration of nominal categories in terms of variety, adjectival richness, and amount of modification, in relation to so­cial variations.10 These differences were attributed to the uses of language in families. Bernstein spent several weeks participating in the workshops, explaining his theories and data schedules, and enabled the partici­pants to correct common misconceptions of Americans about the London research.

How many of these findings can be tested by tradi­tional methods of informant work with adults? Not many. We compared the various interview schedules about language and values concerning language use em­ployed in our field sites and found that often only in­tensive preliminary exploration of the framework of terminology and belief with a few individuals could lay an appropriate foundation for extensive interviewing. Comparing interviews in the Koya tribal group in India with those of lower middle-class Californians, we found

10 Basil Bernstein, "A Sociolinguistic Approach to Socialization," in Hymes and Gumperz. eds .• Directions in Sociolinguistics, op. cit.; W. Brandis and D. Henderson, Social Class, Language and Communi­cation, London: Routledge Be Kegan Paul. in press.

JUNE 1969

a large difference in the elaboration of lexicon and the conceptual framework for discussing questions about language itself. On some concrete points there was a lot of agreement, as on when babies first talk, but terms for speech acts, for styles of speech, and for differences in speech were sometimes absent. One needs, then, to con­sider what kinds of societies require that their members be aware of aspects of speaking. This is just a special case of the question why an elaborated lexicon for any semantic domain is developed-if in some societies speech is a domain as such.

The arguments over interviewing brought to the surface a conflict between the points of view of anthro­pologists who are very conscious that surface forms may have different meanings in different social groups, and psychologists who are concerned with standardization and comparability. The psychologists among the work­shop participants, as a result of some vivid illustrations presented by the field workers, became more aware of the relevance of ethnographic context, and the inade­quacy of translation as a device for retaining the "deep structure" of information sought. The conflict of values in such encounters is best reconciled through prolonged informal discussion and joint commitment to a research problem, such as those examined last summer, which raises questions of comparability and validity.

The sociolinguistics involved in the summer training program is a special branch which has come to be known as microsociolinguistics. Features of the larger society such as degree of industrialization, literacy, and popula­tion density were considered relevant only as they were represented in the language uses to which the child was exposed, the values of his socializers, and his linguistic daily cycle.

THE WORKSHOPS AS TRAINING DEVICES

How efficient were the workshops as training devices? Since their conclusion we have been working on con­vergent data from the several field sites. We have a glimpse of what could have happened if the participants had defined narrower issues and remained committed to them for three months, rather than visiting all the work­shops as many did. From the standpoint of training, there are advantages in working jointly on the same body of data. On the other hand, many participants be­lieved strongly that they needed breadth of training too, and that if they were confined, for instance, to studying the grammar of two-word sentences, they would not learn about bilingual code-switching rules and the struc­ture of address-term selection as examples of the "gram­mar" of sociolinguistic regularities. Because of the broad areas covered by the workshops, and the unusual degree

25

of cross-disciplinary background represented by the faculty, the students were exposed to a wide range of re­lated work, and for many the experience was intense. Anyone who has participated in advanced cross­disciplinary groups knows how painfully slow the mutual education is, once the participants yield part of their sense of the primacy of their own field to a common commitment to a conceptual or research task. This of course was the issue behind the question of open or closed workshops, and on the basis of experience with a group including linguists, educators, psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists, and speech teachers, we still do not know the wiser solution.

In farewell some of the students pointed out that un­like faculty who travel to conferences, they had never met their fellows from other universities. For some, this was the first time they had met anyone sharing their intellectual commitments and it was an exhilarating ex­perience, imparting some of the shock of realignment of beliefs. Since we believe that the kind of field research we envision in sociolinguistics can best be conducted

by collaboration across disciplines, the encounters made may lay the basis for future productive research.

For most of the participants the summer's interchanges raised many new questions, and groups at the Univer­sities of Illinois, Michigan, Texas, Harvard, and Cali- _ fomia at Irvine, Santa Barbara, and Berkeley are con­tinuing research along the lines discussed.l1 In Berkeley work continues on integrating the field results with the aim of developing a more comprehensive theory of ac­quisition of sociolinguistic competence (or communi­cative competence), on studies of the use of language in identifying group boundaries, the structure and devel­opment of code- and style-switching in children, and formal analysis of the structure of coding rules.

11 In Santa Barbara, Aaron Cicourel, Kenneth Jennings, and Robert Boese are continuing work on the development of communicative competence in children who use deaf sign language, some of whom later become skilled at COde-switching between native sign, English. influenced sign and finger-spelling, and oral-lipreading. Boese, whose mother tongue is sign language, gave several videotaped presentations of these phenomena.

THE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY

THE idea of the Prague conference grew out of discus­sions at the international meeting of social psychologists held in Vienna in April 1967, under the joint auspices of the Council's Committee on Transnational Social Psy­chology and the European Association for Experimental Social Psychology.l The participants in the Vienna con­ference found that they had many common research in­terests and agreed that a second meeting to continue and extend the contacts initiated in Vienna would help to

advance research and international scientific cooperation in social psychology. A planning committee 2 was named to explore the prospects for such a conference, and an

• The authors are affiliated respectively with the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, Prague, and the University of Bristol, and are members of the Council's Committee on Transnational Social Psy­chology. The other members are Leon Festinger, New School for Social Research (chairman); Morton Deutsch, Columbia University; Harold H. Kelley, University of California, Los Angeles; Jaap Koeke­bakker, Netherlands Institute for Preventive Medicine, Leiden; John T. Lanzetta, Dartmouth College; Serge Moscovici, University of Paris; and Stanley Schachter, Columbia University; staff, Stanley Lehmann.

1 Cf. "Transnational Social Psychology: Notes on the International Conference in Vienna, April 9-14, 1967:' Items, September 1967, pp. !0-32.

2 Henri Tajfel (chairman); Martin Irle, University of Mannheim; Jaromfr Janou~ek; Harold H. Kelley; Serge Moscovici; and Vladimir A. Yadov, University of Leningrad.

26

IN PRAGUE, OCTOBER 7-11, 1968 by Jm"omir Janousek and Henri Tajjel"

invitation to hold it in Prague was proffered by the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. Funds for partial support of the conference were made available to the Council by the Ford Foundation.

At a meeting of the planning committee with Henry W. Riecken at Aix-en-Provence in January 1968, joint sponsorship of the conference by the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, the Committee on Transnational Social Psychology, and the European Association for Experimental Social Psychology was arranged; a pro­gram of lectures, sessions of working groups to examine special topics, and informal discussions of developments in social psychology in various countries was worked out; and the scholars to be invited were selected.

The conference was held at the Hotel International in Prague, October 7-11, 1968. Forty-three participants were able to attend; they came from Canada, the United States, United Kingdom, France, West Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Ro­mania, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia.3 Short wel-

a In addition to Messrs. Deutsch, Festinger, Irle, Janou§ek, Kelley, and Tajfel, the participants were Robert P. Abelson, Yale University; Erika Apfelbaum and Michel Pecheux, Laboratory of Social Psychology, University of Paris; Maria Carmela Barbiero, Anna Maria Galdo, and Gustavo Iacono, University of Naples; Vera Bokorova, Zdenek Helus,

VOLUME 211, NUMBER 2

coming speeches were given by Academician J. Filip of the Presidium of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences and by representatives of the other sponsors.

-LECTURES

The program included five plenary sessions and meet­ings of six working groups. Three plenary sessions were devoted to invited lectures, followed by discussion: Don­ald T. Campbell spoke on "Quasi-experimental Designs for the Social Psychological Evaluation of Institutional Ameliorative Experiments" 4 (discussant: Misha Jezer­nik); Hilde Himmelweit, on "Social Psychological As­pects of Education" (discussant: Nico Frijda); and Morton Deutsch, on "Conflicts: Productive and De­structive" (discussant: Nikolaj Mansurov).

Campbell distinguished between "trapped" admin­istrators who have so committed themselves in advance to the efficacy of the experimental reform with which they are concerned that they cannot risk objective evaluation, and "experimental" administrators who have justified a program on the basis of the importance of the problem to be resolved, not the certainty of their pro­posed solution, and are committed to going on to another if the first one tried fails. For the former, only favorably biased analyses are feasible. The latter, however, are not threatened by a hard-headed analysis of a program _f reform. Their administrative decisions can lay the basis for useful experimental or quasi-experimental analyses of its results. Campbell devoted the major part of his address to discussion of the ways in which a new program of reform or modification of an existing one can be designed in a quasi-experimental manner. He

Pavel R. Rican, Vladimir Tardy, and Eva Vancurod, Institute of Psychology, Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences; Donald T. Campbell, Northwestern University; Mario L. von Cranach, Max-Planck Institute for Psychiatry, Munich; Claude Flament, University of Aix-Marseille, Aix·en-Provence; Nico Henri Frijda, University of Amsterdam; Hilde Himmelweit, London School of Economics; Gustav Jahoda, University of Strathclyde; Joseph M. F. Jaspars, University of Leiden; Misha D. Jezernik, University of Ljubljana; Edward E. Jones, Duke University; Anton Jurovsky, Research Institute of Child Psychology, Bratislava; Irwin Katz, and R. n. Zajonc, University of Michigan; Veronika Kovalikova, Comenius University of Bratislava; Jaro Krivohlavy, Post­graduate Medical Institute, Prague; Ludek KubiCka, Psychiatric Re­search Institute, Prague; Wallace E. Lambert, McGill University; Nikolaj S. Mansurov, Institute of Concrete Sociological Research, Academy of Sciences of the USSR, Moscow; Stanislaw Mika, University of Warsaw; Jid Odehnal, Charles University; Jan Prucha, Czecho­slovak Academy of Sciences; Ragnar Rommetveit, University of Oslo (formerly a member of the Committee on Transnational Social Psy­chology); Nikola Rot, University of Belgrade; Peter Schonbach, Uni­versity of Frankfurt/Main; Melvin Seeman, University of California. Los Angeles; Jerome E. Singer, State University of New York at Stony

.~rook (formerly staff of the committee); Tatiana Slama-Cazacu. Uni­~ersity of Bucharest.

'A revised version of his paper has been published: "Reforms as Experiments," American PsycholOgist, April 1969, pp. 409-429.

JUNE 1969

stressed the need for evaluation research and the inclu­sion of procedures which would enable the scientist or administrator to test whether his program had succeeded as a basis for further decisions. Several illustrative studies were presented and some of the specific techniques for analyzing outcomes were described. When, for example, not all applicants can be chosen for a program, if those accepted are picked by a random device, then a rigorous comparison between the accepted and rejected can be made. In similar fashion if there is a criterion for ac­ceptance, such as age or income, the group at the margin can be split on a random basis and a comparison or a regression discontinuity analysis made. The methods and designs appropriate for evaluation of experimental programs were related to the types of measurement error and bias which they helped correct.

For a conceptual framework within which to examine conditions in which the school is likely to have a larger influence on the child than the other socializing influ­ences to which he is exposed, Himmelweit drew on her published follow-up study of 450 male adolescents in middle- and working-class families.5 Initially tested when they were 13-14 years old, the subjects were re­interviewed when they were 24-25. The results showed the crucial influence of school on the individual's edu­cational and vocational adjustment, attitudes, goals, as­pirations, and self-image.

Traditionally studies of socialization have focused on the home as the major source of social learning experi­ences. The consequences of a family's status in society (social class), of family size, and of intrafamily relation­ships have been considered of major importance. Other socializing agents often have been treated merely as modifiers of influences from the home. Since family and school are partners in equipping the child for his re­sponsibilities and tasks as an adult, Himmelweit urged that the school as socializing agent be studied in depth and across cultures, as the family has been.

Himmelweit based her model on observation of the English school system, particularly on the secondary school, but believed that it has general applicability since it is concerned with delineating the conditions within society under which school is likely to influence pupils strongly or weakly. The school is a central inde­pendent variable. The pupil's personal attributes and previous socialization experiences from home, peers, and neighborhood are regarded as intervening variables which modify the impact of particular school environ­ments on such dependent variables as school involve-

5 Hilde T. HimmelNeit, "Social Background. Intelligence and School Structure-an Interaction Analysis," in J. D. Meade and A. S. Parkes, eds., Genetic and Environmental Factors in Human Ability, Edinburgh: Olh'er and Boyde, 1966.

27

ment and performance, attainments in further educa­tion and work, and on aspirations, social attitudes (including authoritarianism), and self-image.

The kinds of variables which define schools as institu­tions were discussed. Relevant variables include: the particular educational and socializing tasks set for the school by society and, to a lesser extent, by neighborhood and parents; the school's place in the larger educational system; its resources in terms of the intake characteristics of its pupils as well as its teachers, buildings, etc.; and the degree of its control over objectives, curriculum, and internal organization. A school system becomes a strong one when each school is so organized that it maximizes the chances of its pupils' readily internalizing the values of the school. School strategies which would aid this in­ternalization include the making available of a variety of well-defined "success" statuses.

Deutsch defined the typical characteristics of both destructive conflicts and productive conflicts and identi­fied the underlying psychological processes which result in such conflicts. Destructive conflict was described as being characterized by a tendency to expand and to escalate. Such conflict leads to an increasing reliance upon the strategy of power and upon the tactics of threat, coercion, and deception. The tendency to esca­late conflict results from the conjunction of three inter­related processes: competitive processes involved in the attempt to win the conflict; processes of misperception and biased perception; and processes of commitment arising out of pressures for cognitive and social con­sistency. Productive conflicts were described as re­sembling a creative process of cooperative problem­solving in which the conflicting parties have the joint interest of resolving a mutual problem.

He discussed the factors that tend to direct conflict in a productive or destructive course and also the prob­lems involved in changing the course of conflict. He. stated that the characteristic processes and effects elicited by a cooperative or competitive relationship tend also to give rise to that relationship. Thus, the strategy of power and the tactics of coercion result from and also result in a competitive relationship. Similarly. the strategy of mutual problem-solving and the tactics of persuasion, openness, and mutual enhancement elicit and also are elicited by a cooperative orientation.

Emphasis was placed on conflict between the peo­ple who have considerable authority to make decisions and relatively great control over the means of social and political influence, and groups that have little decision-making authority and relatively little control over conventional means of influence. This type of con­flict is characteristic of the present time. It was pointed out that social scientists have rarely served as consultants

28

to the poor and weak rather than the rich and strong. The unwitting consequence has been distorted perspec­tive and neglect of certain basic problems. Strategies for inducing change available to relatively powerless groups_ were considered. _J SESSIONS OF WORKING GROUPS

Six working groups were organized to consider special topics on which the planning committee had asked in­vited participants to express preferential interests. A number of papers reporting recent research were pre­sented at the sessions of the working groups. Some groups mainly discussed these research reports; others were primarily concerned with more general discussion of important research problems in their areas. One plenary session was devoted to reports from the working groups, so that all the participants were informed about the work of each group. By general consensus this pro­cedure was effective in improving communication. A brief summary of the discussions of each group follows.

Socialization in childhood and youth (participants: Himmelweit, Jahoda, Jurovsky, Mansurov, Mika, Odeh­nal, Singer, Vancurov<i, Zajonc). After discussing the general nature of socialization, the participants dis­tinguished between the process itself and its end prod­ucts, and also between behavior relevant and irrelevant to norms. Factors influencing the process of socializa­tion at different age levels were considered. After dis_ cussion of concrete problems in research-variables ~ connected with juvenile delinquency, influence of fami-ly, friends, teachers, and peer groups; acquisition of so­cial norms; changes in the models of education both in family and school over long periods-detailed proposals for cross-cultural studies of socialization were made.

Cognitive and behavioral consistency (participants: Abelson, Bokorova, Festinger, Flament, Irle, Kovali­kova). The discussion was concerned with the problems of defining dissonance situations. Different classes of inconsistencies were distinguished from the one special case of cognitive dissonance. The conception of "impli­cational molecules" was considered as a way to define psy­chologically meaningful balanced or unbalanced states. The consequences of different styles in decision-making behavior for postdecision behavior, for cognitive con­sistency, and for production of cognitive dissonance were discussed, as were problems of dissonance reduction by reinterpretation of a task, and the possibility of con­structing experimental designs when the situation is open to different modes of reduction of dissonance.

Interpersonal conflict (participants: Deutsch, Apfel­baum, Kelley, Krivohlavy, Kubicka). The topics dis-a cussed were: the role of the image of the opponent, theW relevance of concepts of interpersonal conflict for con-

VOLUME 23. NUMBER 2

flicts at other levels and of broader dimension, the in­terplay of sex and intelligence, the influence of unequal power of participants on a decision, preferential judg-

.aments, and different kinds of intervention by a third per-9son in a two-person game. Much attention was given to

methodological problems in classical kinds of games, their new forms, and new types of games. It was shown that pregame and postgame evaluation of decisions and motivational structure are being increasingly attempted in addition to analysis of the game itself. Possibilities for a more systematic exchange of information on re­search on interpersonal conflict were suggested.

Social psychology of language (participants: Slama­Cazacu, Janousek, Lambert, Pecheux, Prucha, Rom­metveit, Schon bach). Different approaches used in re­search on social psychological aspects of language were considered in detail. The complete utterance was taken as the basic minimal unit for analysis. Such an utterance takes place in its relevant context, a situation with psy­chological and ecological aspects. The sociocultural frame was considered to be the largest such context. Discussions of actual research projects indicated the ef­fects of different contexts. In addition, the following problems were considered: preferences for verbal styles as effects of ecological and cultural frames; the role of linguistic and nonlinguistic components in the trans­mission of the message; reversal of roles of sender and

e:eceiver; implications of the context in content analysis. Intergroup relations (participants: Campbell, Bar­

biero, Galdo, Helus, Iacono, Jezernik, Katz, Seeman, Tajfel). The group's discussions fell into two cate­gories: methodological and substantive issues. No firm conclusions were reached in either category. The methodological discussions were focused on use of small group experiments for clarifying the variables determin­ing large-scale intergroup relations, use of quasi­experimental designs, and cross-cultural comparisons. An experiment reported by Tajfel provided the basis for the first; the lecture previously delivered by Campbell, for the second; reports by J ezernik, by Barbiero and Galdo, and by Campbell on his own and Robert LeVine's cross­cultural research on ethnocentrism, for the third. The substantive discussions concerned the structure of moti­vation in underprivileged groups, and the major vari­ables underlying ethnocentrism. The latter was again based on considerations arising in Campbell and Le­Vine's project; the former was guided by the work of Katz on children's achievement motivation in the United States, of Seeman on expectancy of failure based on data from Sweden and the United States, and of Iacono on the

Aaffiliation motive in Southern Italy. ,. Social perception (participants: von Cranach, Frijda,

Jaspars, Jones, Rot). The papers and topics discussed

JUNE 1969

were concerned more with the perception of social events than with social factors in perception. Different methods of assessment-ratings of persons on self­constructed scales, direct similarity judgments, semantic differential-were compared. Also discussed were the results of experiments on the attribution of ability, on recognition of facial expressions of emotions, and recog­nition of looking behavior. It was obvious that research on social perception is progressing in several countries.

New possibilities of cooperation among participants in working groups emerged during the sessions, es­pecially on socialization, interpersonal conflict, social psychology of language, and intergroup relations.

CONCLUSION

At the closing plenary session problems of further transnational cooperation in the advancement of social psychology were discussed. Particular stress was laid on the need to create opportunities for communication and informal scholarly contacts among younger research workers, and on the usefulness of research conferences of small groups of specialists from different countries.

Participants from Eastern Europe expressed their ap­preciation of the work of the independent committee named at the conference in Vienna for the purpose of facilitating the exchange of research literature. The committee is to be enlarged and will continue its help in the circulation of books and journals contributed by participants from Eastern Europe.

The participants from abroad had an opportunity to get acquainted with Prague and with Czechoslovak cul­ture and contemporary life. A banquet was given for the participants by the President of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, Academician Sarm.

The conference was undoubtedly successful in helping to establish and promote personal and intellectual rela­tions among its participants. The Czechoslovak hosts II stressed the value of holding the conference in their country at a time when it was particularly important for them to maintain international scientific and cultural bonds. The participants from abroad left the conference with grateful memories of the efficiency with which the conference was conducted and of the generous and warm hospitality offered to them.

6 The members of the Czechoslovak Organizing Committee were Vladimir Tardy, Director of the Institute of Psychology (chairman); Anton Jurovsky, President of the Czechoslovak Psychological Associa­tion and chairman of the conference; Vera Bokorova; Zdenek Helus; Jaromlr Janousek, secretary of the conference. Many workers from the Psychological and Pedagogical Institutes also were involved. Oleh Panczak, head of the Congress Center of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, with his co-workers provided for the day-to-day management of the conference.

29

PERSONNEL

FACULTY RESEARCH GRANTS

The Committee on Faculty Research Grants-Frank R. Westie (chairman), Stanley M. Elkins, Edward E. Jones, Everett C. Ladd, Jr., Laura Nader, Peter N. Stearns, and Jerome L. Stein-at its meeting on March 27-28 awarded 28 grants and named several alternates, 4 of whom have subsequently been offered awards. The 32 grantees are listed below:

Joseph B. Aceves, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Southern Methodist University, for research in the Province of Segovia, Spain, on changing value orienta­tions in a village undergoing rapid technological change

Jerold S. Auerbach, Assistant Professor of History, Brandeis University, for research on the American legal profession between the World Wars, 1919-41

David D. Bien, Professor of History, University of Michi­gan, for research on the army, aristocracy, and social mobility in eighteenth-century France

Joseph C. Burke, Associate Professor of History, Du­quesne University, for research on the Cherokee Cases decided by the Supreme Court

David Chaplin, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Univer­sity of Wisconsin, for research in England and Spain on domestic service and industrialization

Beverly Blair Cook, Lecturer on Political Science, Uni­versity of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, for research on fed­eral district judges' perceptions and evaluations of their roles

Joseph de Rivera, Associate Professor of Psychology, New York University, for research toward development of a theory of aggression, hostility, and anger

Sigmund Diamond, Professor of Historical Sociology and of History, Columbia University, for research in Europe on seventeenth-century theories of motivation and of social organization

Stephen Elkin, Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania, for research in England on immigration and urban politics in three cities

Fred I. Greenstein, Professor of Government, Wesleyan University, for research in the United States, England, and France on a new method of studying political socializa tion

Raymond F. Hopkins, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Swarthmore College, for research on the growth and decay of political legitimacy in new nations

Christen T. Jonassen, Professor of Sociology, Ohio State University, for research in the United States and Nor­way on a probabilistic concept of national character

Stephen P. Koff, Associate Professor of Political Science, Syracuse University, for research in Italy on the re­lations between legislators from a multimember district and their constituents

Roger Lane, Associate Professor of History, Haverford College, for research on the history of crime and vio­lence in the United States in the nineteenth century

so

Gordon K. Lewis, Professor of Political Science, Univer­sity of Puerto Rico, for research in the United Kingdom

and in the West Indies on the adjustment of West Indians to settlement in the United Kingdom _

Lionel S. Lewis, Associate Professor of Sociology, State University of New York at Buffalo, for research in England and Sweden on the scientific and literary cul­tures in those countries and the United States

Vernon L. Lidtke, Associate Professor of History, Johns Hopkins University, for research in Germany on the culture of the working class in the nineteenth century

Radomir Luza, Associate Professor of History, Tulane University, for research in Austria on the German oc­cupation and the rise of Austrian nationalism, 1938-45

Robert D. Marcus, Assistant Professor of History, State University of New York at Stony Brook, for research on attitudes of American students and politicians toward political parties, 1865-1920

A. Lloyd Moote, Associate Professor of History, Univer­sity of Southern California, for research in France on the role of "ministers-favorite," 1610-61

John R. Moroney, Associate Professor of Economics, Michigan State University, for research on a classical model of comparative regional advantage

Stanley G. Payne, Professor of History, University of Wis­consin, for research in the United States and Spain on modern Catalan nationalism

E. N. Peterson, Professor of History, Wisconsin State University - River Falls, for research in Germany on the implementation of policies of the U.S. Military Government, 1945-55

John L. Phelan, Professor of History, University of Wi. consin, for research in Spain and South America 01. reform, revolt, and revolution in the Spanish Empire

David Schoenbaum, Assistant Professor of History, Uni­versity of Iowa, for research in West Germany on the 1969 federal election campaign

James Ro&er S~arp, Assistant Professor of History, Syra­cuse UmversIty, for research on the Jeffersonians' con­cept of an opposition party

William L. Silber, Assistant Professor of Economics, New York University, for research in Israel on its capital market with particular reference to the concept of "thinness"

Joel Silbey, Professor of American History, Cornell Uni­versity, for research on the maintenance of the Demo­cratic Party, 1860-70

Keith L. Sprunger, Associate Professor of History, Bethel College, for research in England and the Netherlands on English churches and the English community in the latter country in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries

Joseph E. Stiglitz, Associate Professor of Economics, Yale University, for research in England on dynamic models of competitive economies in the presence of uncertainty

Harold D. Woodman, Associate Professor of History, Uni­versity of Missouri - Columbia, for research in the United States and England on the effects of domestic and foreign trade on the socioeconomic development of the southern United States in the nineteenth century

David S. Wyman, Assistant Professor of History, Uni. versity of Massachusetts, for research on United State~ policy toward refugees from Nazism, 1942-45

VOLUME 23, NUMBER 2

RESEARCH TRAINING FELLOWSHIPS

In addition to the fellowship awards listed in the March issue of Items, the Committee on Social Science Personnel has voted to offer 5 new appointments:

R. Bruce W. Anderson, Ph.D. candidate in sociology, Duke University, postdoctoral fellowship for training at the University of California, Berkeley, in sociolin­guistics

Kenji Ima, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Illinois Insti­tute of Technology, postdoctoral fellowship for train­ing at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in sociolinguistics

Robert J. Lieber, Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of California, Davis, postdoctoral fellowship for study of the theory of political integration and training at Nuffield College, University of Oxford, in research methodology

Lewis Merklin, Jr., M.D., Chief, Psychiatric Service, Federal Correctional Institution, Lompoc, Calif., post­doctoral fellowship for training at the Tavistock Center for Applied Social Research, in social psychology

Alice Stewart, Ph.D. candidate in sociology, Brandeis University, postdoctoral fellowship for research train­ing at the University of Florence in political economy

GRANTS FOR ASIAN STUDIES

The Joint Committee on Asian Studies, sponsored with the American Council of Learned Societies-Robert I. Crane (chairman), Marius B. Jansen, Joseph R. Levenson, Richard L. Park, Lauriston Sharp, Laurence Sickman, and

.a Robert O. Tilman-at its meeting on February 8-9 awarded

., grants to 29 scholars under its continuing program of aid for advanced research in the humanities and social sciences dealing with East Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia:

Felicia G. Bock, Instructor in Oriental Languages, Uni­versity of California, Berkeley, for translation of the Engi-shiki, procedures to supplement the law codes of Japan, compiled in Engi Era (901-922 A.D.)

Anneliese G. Bulling, Research Associate in Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University, for research on the history of Chinese mirrors

James B. Crowley, Associate Professor of History, Yale University, for research on Anglo-Japanese relations: the China Incident, 1936-39, and World War I

Norma J. Diamond, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of Michigan, for research on modernization and role change in Taiwan

David M. Farquhar, Assistant Professor of History, Uni­versity of California, Los Angeles, for research on the central government of the YUan dynasty

Wen C. Fong, Professor of Art and Archaeology, Prince­ton University, for research on Tao-chi's calligraphy

Benjamin H. Hazard, Jr., Associate Professor of History, San Jose State College, for research on early Yi Korea responses to Japanese marauding

Alfred B. Hudson, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Michigan State University, for a linguistic survey of the indigenous languages of Borneo

Leon N. Hurvitz, Associate Professor of Japanese Lan­guage and Literature, University of Washington, for

JUNE 1969

translation of Tsukamoto's General History Of Chinese Buddhism, Vol. I

Eugene F. Irschick, Assistant Professor of History, Uni­versity of California, Berkeley, for research on the Provincial style of politics in Tamil Nad, 1895-1915

Blair B. Kling, Assistant Professor of History, University of Illinois, for research on the emergence of an indus­trial elite in India, 1800-1914

Lewis R. Lancaster, Assistant Professor of Oriental Lan­guages, University of California, Berkeley, for study of the Prajiiii literature

Jung-Pang Lo, Associate Professor of History, University of California, Davis, for research on the technology of salt production in China

William W. Lockwood, Professor of Politics and Inter­national Affairs, Princeton University, for research on democracy and development in Asia

Owen M. Lynch, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, State University of New York at Binghamton, for re­search on squatter settlement in a North Indian city

James M. Mahar, Associate Professor of Oriental Studies, University of Arizona, for research on internal mi­gration and occupational mobility in the northern Gangetic Plain, India

Byron K. Marshall, Associate Professor of History, Uni­versity of Minnesota, for research on Japanese uni­versities and social change

James A. Matisoff, Assistant Professor of Linguistics, Columbia University, for research on Lahu and Tibeto­Burman linguistics

David Morton, Associate Professor of Music, University of California, Los Angeles, for research on the compo­sitions of Luang Pradit Phairo

James L. Peacock, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of North Carolina, for research on the role of Islam in modernization of the Indonesian life arc

Steven I. Piker, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Swarthmore College, for research on religion and so­ciety in Theravada South East Asia

Donald B. Rosenthal, Associate Professor of Political Science, State University of New York at Buffalo, for research on patterns of urbanism in India

David Rubin, teaching faculty, literature, Sarah Law­rence College, for research on the Hindi writer Nirala

Bernard Silberman, Associate Professor of History, Duke University, for research on leadership recruitment in Japanese political parties, 1890-1941

David R. Sturtevant, Professor of History, Muskingum College, for research on religious rebels in the Philip­pines, 1840-1940

Arthur E. Tiedemann, Professor of History, City College, City University of New York, for research on Japanese history in the early Sh6wa period

Richard P. Tucker, Assistant Professor of History, Oak­land University, for research on cultural renaissance and political nationalism in Maharashtra

Walter F. Vella, Professor of History, University of Hawaii, for research on King Vajiravudh and the emergence of Thai nationalism

John K. Whitmore, Assistant Professor of History, Yale University, for research on the nature of the state and society in fifteenth-century Vietnam

31

COUNCIL STAFF Stanley Lehmann, Research Scientist in Psychology at New

York University, joined the staff of the Council in December 1968 as part-time Consultant. He received his Ph.D. in

social psychology from Columbia University and was pre­viously Assistant Professor of Psychology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. Mr. Lehmann serves as staff of the Committee on Transnational Social Psychology.

NEW PUBLICA rlONS Agricultural Development in China, 1368-1968, by Dwight

H. Perkins. Sponsored by the Committee on the Economy of China. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, June 1969. c. 528 pages. $12.50.

The Central Middle East: A Handbook of Anthropology, edited by Louise E. Sweet. Product of a project initiated by the Joint Committee on the Near and Middle East. New Haven: Human Relations Area Files, September 1968. HRAFlex Book MI-001. 2 vols. 420 pages. $13.50.

China in Revolution: The First Phase, 1900-1913, edited by Mary Clabaugh Wright. Product of the Conference on the Chinese Revolution of 1911, sponsored by the Joint Committee on Contemporary China, August 22-27, 1965. New Haven: Yale University Press, November 1968. 518 pages. $15.00.

Chinese Communist Politics in Action, edited by A. Doak Barnett. Papers prepared for the Conference on Micro­societal Study of the Chinese Political System, sponsored by the Subcommittee on Chinese Government and Poli­tics, Joint Committee on Contemporary China, August 29 - September I, 1967. Seattle: University of Washington Press, April 1969. 648 pages. Cloth, $12.50; paper $3.95.

The Chinese Economy under Communism, by Nai-Ruenn Chen and Walter Galenson. Sponsored by the Committee on the Economy of China. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, June 1969. c. 256 pages. c. $7.95.

Conduct and Conscience: The Socialization of Internalized Control over Behavior, by Justin Aronfreed. Expansion of a paper prepared for the conference on moral develop­ment, held by the former Committee on Socialization and Social Structure, October 31- November 3, 1963. New York: Academic Press, October 1968. 414 pages. $12.50.

Economic TTends in Communist China, edited by Alexan­der Eckstein, Walter Galenson, and Ta-Chun~ Liu. Prod­uct of a conference sponsored by the Committee on the Economy of China, October 21-23, 1965. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, September 1968.757 pages. $17.50.

Industrial Development in Pre-Communist China, by John K. Chang. Sponsored by the Committee on the Economy of China. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, June 1969. 192 pages. c. $6.00.

Language Problems of Developing Nations, edited by Joshua A. Fishman, Charles A. Ferguson, and Jyotirindra Das Gupta. Papers prepared for the conference sponsored by the Committee on Sociolinguistics, November 1-3, 1966. New York: John Wiley & Sons, September 1968. 536 pages. $12.95.

The Nature of Fascism: Proceedings of a Conference Held by the Reading University Graduate School of Con­temporary European Studies, edited by S. J. Woolf. Product of a conference held with the aid of the Com­mittee on Comparative Politics, April 3-4, 1967. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, November 1968. 268 pages.

People of Rural America, by Dale E. Hathaway, J. Allan Beegle, and W. Keith Bryant. Sponsored by the former Committee on Population Census Monographs in co­operation with the Bureau of the Census. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, January 1969. 298 pages. $3.50.

Political Research and Political Theory, edited by Oliver Garceau. Prepared with the assistance of the Council. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, September 1968. 266 pages. $7.95.

Political Science and Public Policy, edited by Austin Ran­ney. Product of conferences sponsored by the Committee I on Governmental and Legal Processes, June 15-17, 1966 and August 28-29, 1967. Chicago: Markham Publishing Company, September 1968. 300 pages. $5.95.

Public Policy, Vol. 17, edited by John D. Montgomery and Albert O. Hirschman. Includes 5 papers prepared for the Conference on Military Occupations and Political Change, held by the Committee on Comparative Politics, April 20-22, 1967: "The Legacies of the Occupation of Germany," by Carl J. Friedrich; "The Potential for Democratization in Occupied Germany: A Problem in Historical Projection," by Leonard Krieger; "Allied Strategies of Effecting Political Change and Their Recep­tion in Occupied Germany," by Peter H. Merkl; "Soviet Occupation m Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary," by Hugh Seton·Watson; "The Potential for Democratiza­tion in Prewar Japan," by Robert E. Ward. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, September 1968. 474 pages. $7.00.

SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH COUNCIL

230 PARK AVENUE. NEW YORK. N.Y. 10017

Incorporated in the State of Illinois, December 27, 1924, for the purpose of advancing research in the social sciences

Directors, 1969: WILLIAM O. AYDELOTTE, ABRAM BERGSON, PETER M. BLAU, DORWIN CARTWRIGHT, JAMES S. COLEMAN, ELIZABETH COLSON, HAROLD

C. CONKLIN, LEE J. CRONBACH, PHILIP D. CURTIN, DANIEL X. FREEDMAN, ZVI GRILICHES, MORRIS H. HANSEN, CHAUNCY D. HARRIS, SAMUEL P. HAyS,

MATIHEW HOLDEN. JR., DELL HYMES. GARDNER LINDZEY. GEOFFREY H. MOOIlE, JAlIIES N. MORGAN, FREDERICK MOSTELLER, DON K. PRICE. AUSTIN

RANNEY, ALDERT REES, HENRY \V. RIECKEN, HERBERT A. SllIION, NEIL J. SMELSER, ALLAN H. SlIIlTH, JOHN THIBAUT, DAVID B. TRUMAN, ROBERT E.

WARD

Officers and Staff: HENRY \V. RIECKEN, President; PAUL WEBBINK. Vice-President; ELBRIDGE SIBLEY, BRYCE \V~OD, Executive Associates; ELEANOR t C. IsBELL, ROWLAND L. MITCHELL, JR., NORMAN W. STORER, Staff Associates; STANLEY LEH~IANN. Consultant; CATHERINE V. RONNAN. Financial Secretary

32