Book Reviews : Social Change and the Individual—A Study of the Social and Religious Responses to Innovation in a Zambian Rural Community. By NORMAN LONG (Manchester, Manchester University Press, for the Institute for Social Research, University of Zambia, 1968). xix + 257 pp. 55s

This work poses difficulties in the use of the generation concept as a social research instrument, due to its complex and multidimensional nature. A complexity by which is not a concept widely used in a current Sociology that focuses more on the mathematisation. But some social processes cannot be reduced to algorithms. For the theoretical review we have used contributions from Sociology, Philosophy and History, because it is of a transversal disciplinary nature, and we have applied it to the identification of Spanish generations in the 20th century. Inspired by Ortega’s theses and Strauss and Howe empirical development implemented for American society, the resulting model presents six generations with different collective identities that reflect the social changes in the history of Spain during the last century. A model that, after being tested in sectorial investigations, may constitute a useful new tool for the analysis of social change.

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Book Reviews: Suicides, Philosophical Disputes in the Social Sciences, Social Research and Royal Commissions, Official Discourse, the View from Goffman, Greek Homosexuality, the Sociology of Rock, Marx and Mead: Contributions to a Sociology of Knowledge, Crime and Conflict in English Communities, 1300–1348, Demystifying Social Statistics, for Science in the Social Sciences, Marxism and Class Theory, the Material Word: Some Theories of Language and its Limits, Ethics and Society in England: The Revolution in the Social Sciences, 1870–1914, Street Ethnography, on Clichés

The Sociological Review ◽

10.1111/j.1467-954x.1980.tb00600.x ◽

1980 ◽

Vol 28 (4) ◽

pp. 893-920

Author(s):

Steve Taylor ◽

Calvin A. Woodward ◽

Gilbert Smith ◽

Norman Stockman ◽

David Jary ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Social Sciences ◽

Sociology Of Knowledge ◽

Social Research ◽

Class Theory ◽

Official Discourse ◽

The Social ◽

Social Statistics ◽

The Revolution

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The Dubai Community Psychiatric Survey: acculturation and the prevalence of psychiatric disorder

Psychological Medicine ◽

10.1017/s0033291700026891 ◽

1994 ◽

Vol 24 (1) ◽

pp. 121-131 ◽

Cited By ~ 17

Author(s):

R. Ghubash ◽

E. Hamdi ◽

P. Bebbington

Keyword(s):

Social Change ◽

Cultural Change ◽

Psychiatric Morbidity ◽

Community Level ◽

Gulf Region ◽

Individual Level ◽

Oil Reserves ◽

Community Psychiatric ◽

The Social ◽

The Individual

SynopsisDubai, an Emirate in the Gulf region, has experienced spectacular social change as a result of the exploitation of its oil reserves. The Dubai Community Psychiatric Survey was designed to study the effects of this social change on the mental health of female nationals.In this paper, we approach the problem by quantifying social change in two main ways: the first focused on social change at the individual level as measured by the Socio-cultural Change Questionnaire (Bebbington et al. 1993). The second examined the effect of social change at the community level by identifying areas of residence at different levels of development. We hypothesized that attitudes and behaviours markedly at odds with traditional prescriptions would be associated with high rates of psychiatric morbidity.On the individual level, the association between psychiatric morbidity and the amount of social change reflected in the behaviours and views of the subjects was not significant. However, there was a significant association between morbidity and between social attitudes and behaviours. At the community level, in contrast, the relationship between psychiatric morbidity and social change was significant: there was more psychiatric morbidity in areas at the extremes of the social change continuum. The hypothesis put forward in this study must be modified accordingly.

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