ABSTRACT

We have undertaken in the last five chapters of this monograph to explore the most fundamental theorem of MHIM in longitudinal per­ spective: aspects of sociocultural contextual settings (in both their nor­ mative and deviant forms) operating both inside and outside of the family, during childhood and adulthood, have measurable consequences reflected in differences in mental health composition among subgroups within a community population.1 The scientific challenges which we have met, in so doing, involved life-span measures and data analysis: Measures. We developed measures of sociocultural contextual settings operating both inside and outside the family during childhood and adult­ hood by using both the data collected in MHIM1 and some additional items added to MHIM2 to fill in some gaps in the MHIM1 data which became evident to the senior author after the publication of Mental Health in the Metropolis. These measures were as follows:

Contexts o f childhood: Three sociocultural measures addressed the family as a microsocial environment for childhood development. We looked at: (1) Parental Intrafamily Functioning, the extent to which the Midtowners portrayed their parents as having created a warm, loving and supportive setting for childhood development; (2) Parental Bread­ winner Adequacy, the extent to which the Midtowners portrayed their parents as having reliably and adequately provided for the material necessities and luxuries of life; and (3) Family-Kin Network extensivity, the extent to which the Midtowners portrayed their childhood family as having social relations with other family members, friends and neigh­ bors in their childhood community. In addition we looked at a biologi-

cal measure, Body Damage, which differentiated between Midtowners who had basic physical constitutional malformations or malfunctions in their childhood and Midtowners who had sound physical constitu­ tions in childhood.