ABSTRACT
In the various critical accounts of the human condition, little is typically said about city size, since it is hard to imagine this source of discontent as a basis for class consciousness or political mobilization. Dissatisfaction is the presumed consequence of some thwarting of life goals and aspirations. It follows that any account of the sources of discontent has to begin with a consideration of life goals. This chapter shows that much dissatisfaction is linked to life cycle, age, and especially various marital disruptions. The number of married males and females should be approximately the same in any well-chosen sample. The disparity, the respective 32% and 36% figures, represents an undersampling of husbands who, being more frequently out of the house, are not reached by the Survey Research Center (SRC) interviewers. The chapter presents the distribution of the adult population in America in the early 1970's by sex and marital status and also presents the data on the life quality measures with age.
