ABSTRACT
Deferred gratification evidently refers to postponement of gratifications or satisfactions. Thus, in the job area, as Hollingshead shows, the lower class boy, eager to pay his own way and escape family domination, seeks a full-time job at a very early age and accordingly leaves school. Through the work of Kinsey and his associates, much clarification has been given to the deferred gratification pattern as it manifests itself in the sexual sphere. Ginzberg notes that "the poor" discount the future more heavily than "the better situated classes", and thereby, in terms, as far as sexual intercourse is concerned, they do not defer gratification relative to "higher" classes. The polling technique is not the best one for studying the sexual behavior of high school children. The poll questions had to be formulated rather vaguely because of the prevalent attitudes regarding sexual matters in high schools, and they failed to yield any clues to class differences in sexual behavior.
