ABSTRACT
PEOPLE ARE what they are by virtue of qualities impressed on them by nature and by habit. These qualities combine both to distinguish people from each other and to cause them to resemble each other. Each person carries the imprimatur of his heredity and of the successes or the failures with which his family met the life tasks in the successive stages of the cycle of family life. And each person has been influenced in his development by social, economic, and psychological conditions permeating the society of which he is part. These forces of endowment, of family, and of society interact and determine the manner and the competence with which the individual will fill his expected role in the conduct of developmental tasks of the family. These forces likewise determine how he will perform in all of his social roles through social interaction—biologically, 212psychologically, economically. The sum of his behavior in these several roles is the measurement of the quality of his social functioning.
