ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to report the findings of a survey conducted between 1974 and 1978 among Qatari college men and women students. It explores inter-sex comparisons of attitudes, as well as comparisons with assumed traditional attitudes. The family in Qatar, as in the other Gulf states, still remains to a very large extent the primary institution for economic and social control as well as for the protection of the rights of its members. The conjugal units living within the extended family were held by close emotional ties which were generally bolstered by mutual economic and social interests. People depend for their livelihood upon participation in a "modernized" oil economy rather than upon a pastoral economy of grazing and camel breeding with its jealously guarded tribal territories and rights. The less traditional attitudes which the respondents possess have been triggered by the oil industry, sedentarization, urbanization, and by education.
