afwef ducted in person, over the telephone, or through the mails, that inquire into the ways a group

of people thinks or acts. In conducting surveys, researchers first identify the population, or group of
sub- jects they wish to survey. Then they use statistical methods to pick a random but representative
sample of that popula- tion

Surveys often reveal information that runs counter to common sense and prior beliefs. For example,
the famous Kinsey reports of the 1940s and early 1950s studied Americans' sexual behav ior,
including the percentage of men and women who engaged in premarital sexual intercourse. In 1948
Kinsey et al. reported that sixty-eight percent of college men and sixty percent of college women had
engaged in premarital sexual intercourse. This figure surprised many people and

may well have had the effect of liberaliz ing sexual attitudes. The data showed that premarital sex
was more common than generally believed. This led some people to believe that perhaps sex was
not as immoral as many people claimed. More recent surveys conducted in the 1970s (Hunt, 1974,
Tavris & Sadd, 1977) indicate that premarital sex was even more common a generation after the Kin-
sey reports. These reports indicated that sixty-eight percent of unmarried women and ninety-seven
percent of unmarried men have had sexual intercourse by the age of twenty-five.

Surveys have two important limita- tions. One is that the survey results can be generalized only to
the population of persons from whom the sample was. drawn. For example, if Kinsey had se- lected
his sample only from blue-collar

FOCUS

Psychologists learn a great deal about be- havior from naturalistic observation and from studying
individual cases. With both of these methods, however, we must always ask one important question
is what we found in one situation true in another? If Americans are romantic or emotional, can we
assume that Europeans, or Australians. are the same? if a study is conducted on child rearing
practices in Boston, does it tell us anything about how bables are treated in Los Angeles or Hong
Kong? Oftentimes, of course, the answer to these questions is no Generalizing from one group to
another can be risky. For this reason, psychologists and other behavioral scientists, particularly an-
thropologists, often do cross-cultural studies to look at some phenomenon such as cre ativity or
religion in different societies around the world. They try to see if general- izations can be made
about how human be- ings in all lands behave, or about how soci eties in general are organized

Cross-Cultural Research

and women or simply the social patterns that had evolved in Western societies over the centuries.
Many people believed that men and women everywhere followed the traditional American pattern
because that was "natural" Others felt that both men and women were capable of being assertive or
passive, depending on how they were: raised. Mead shared the latter belief and set out to prove her
point by showing that the American pattern was not universal

In her classic book. Sex and Temperament (1935) Mead reported on the level of aggres- siveness and
assertiveness among both men and women in three primitive societies She first described the
peaceful Arapesh, where neither men nor women were hostile ar domineering The second society
was the Mundugamoor, a highly warlike tribe where both men and women were active, competi
tive, and, when necessary, aggressive Finally, she discussed the Tachambull, a society where
Western patterns were reversed men tended to be passive and subordinate, while women were
assertive and dominant. From this cross-cultural study Margaret Mead could convincingly claim that
patterns of masculine and feminine behavior in the United States were no more "natural" than fruit
colored cereal

One important cross-cultural study by the noted anthropologist Margaret Mead is a good example.
Mead was interested in whether the pattern of behavior observed in the United States in the 1930s,
where men were typically aggressive and assertive and women passive and subordinate, reflected
basic biological differences between men

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