ABSTRACT

The national surveys of the American population analyzed yield a very different portrait of the American population, of their goals, concerns, and satisfactions. Many people, understandably, reported marriage and the family as their respective first and second choices. Only a tiny number reversed that procedure, putting the good family life in the first place. Some of these cited a happy marriage as their second option, but most of them, instead, gave health or religious faith as their second choices. A life anxiety problem is mentioned by one respondent in twenty. Fears of rising crime and for one's personal safety form another component of the social issue. The Survey Research Center's 1974 Congressional election study posed the same question used in 1972, once again allowing a detailed probe of personal problems and anxieties. All credible evidence assembled over 1970s thus indicates a remarkable continuity in the pattern of human concerns.