ABSTRACT
The socialization of the human individual, his transformation from an infant organism to an adult participant in society, has emerged as the foremost topic of interdisciplinary concern in the behavioral sciences. Within the problem area defined by the term socialization, research is being actively conducted by primatologists, developmental psychologists, psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, psycholinguists, sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, and legal scholars. Even more remarkable than the disparity of researchers is that ’ the overlap and mutual relevance of diverse investigations in this field has received widespread professional recognition—in an extensive collection of reviews by members of a Social Science Research Council committee (Clausen, 1968), in the 1100-page Handbook of Socialization Theory and Research (Goslin, 1969), in the volume on socialization produced by the Association of Social Anthropologists in Britain (Mayer, 1969), in the third edition of CarmichaeTs Manual of Child Psychology (Mussen, 1970), which has a large section devoted to socialization, in an issue of the Journal of Social Issues devoted to legal socialization (Tapp, 1971), and in a large and growing literature on political socialization (see Langton, 1969; Dawson and Prewitt, 1969; Greenberg, 1970). Throughout these recent discussions of theory- and data there is explicit awareness of the fact that no single discipline can solve the intellectual problems in the study of socialization by itself.
