Page:Margaret Mead - Coming of age in Samoa; a psychological study of primitive youth for western civilisation.pdf/301

 jects. These results will be illuminated and illustrated by case histories.

The conclusions are also all subject to the limitation of the personal equation. They are the judgments of one individual upon a mass of data, many of the most significant aspects of which can, by their very nature, be known only to herself. This was inevitable and it can only be claimed in extenuation that as the personal equation was held absolutely constant, the different parts of the data are strictly commensurable. The judgment on the reaction of Lola to her uncle and of Sona to her cousin are made on exactly the same basis.

Another methodological device which possibly needs explanation is the substitution of a cross sectional study for a linear one. Twenty-eight children who as yet showed no signs of puberty, fourteen children who would probably mature within the next year or year and a half, and twenty-five girls who had passed puberty within the last four years but were not yet classed by the community as adults; were studied in detail. Less intensive observations were also made upon the very little children and the young married women. This method of taking cross sections, samples of individuals at different periods of physical development, and arguing that a group in an earlier stage will later show the characteristics which appear in another group at a later stage, is, of course, inferior to a linear study in which the same group is under observation for a number of years. A very large number of cases has usually been the only acceptable defence of such a procedure. The number of cases included in this investigation, while very small in comparison with the numbers mustered by any student of American children, is nevertheless a fair-sized sample in terms of the very small population of Samoa (a rough eight thousand in all four islands of American Samoa) and because the only selection was geographical. It may further be argued that the almost drastic character of the conclusions, the exceed-