ABSTRACT
An analysis of all of the global earlier works on American culture, such as those by Mead, Kluckhohn, Gorer, Ruesch & Bateson, Hsu, Spindler, and Gillin-and there are others-reveals certain commonalities in their characterizations. Though each author phrases the qualities of the culture being analyzed somewhat differently, these observations converge into a fairly coherent list of features. The precise nature of these features, as concepts, is more difficult to define than their content. We will furnish them as descriptive statements of belief and value in presumably pivotal areas of American culture. They are a kind of statement of cultural ideology. They include:
In 1952 we began administering a simple open-ended sentence “values test” to Stanford students in our classes that was organized around these points of consensus. We have continued to do so intermittently since that time and have published interpretive summaries of the results in 1955 and 1974. We regard the responses from our now rather large sample as expressions of cultural ideology. Over the now 30-year period for which we have data, certain response modalities have exhibited a high degree of consistency. Others have exhibited significant shifts.
