The concept "patterns of cultural choice," defined as patterns of money and time use among which people may choose to some degree, is contrasted with terms such as lifestyle and subculture. Eight research articles, comprising this journal issue, which employ alternative strategies of isolating choice patterns, are introduced. (Author/RM)

Compares high school life styles to life styles in society in general. Various styles are discussed, including academic types, delinquents, social types, hippies, freaks, and athletes and their admirers. Suggests that the set of high school subcultures is similar throughout the United States. (DB)

The Leisure Activity Survey is a large national data set collected in 1982 by the Bureau of the Census for the National Endowment for the Arts. Selected preliminary findings are discussed and several other uses of the data set are suggested. (Author/RM)

Six articles focus on various aspects on violence in American society. Titles are "Evolving a Science of Violence,""Violence by Youth; Violence Against Youth,""Victims and Aggressors in Marital Violence,""Television Violence, Victimization, and Power," and "Violence in Business Settings." (DB)

This article begins with an interpretation and description of conceptions of selfhood that are assumed in educational psychologists' programs of theory, research, and practice in the area of student self-development. Three underlying conceptions of the self are considered: (a) the expressive self (found mostly in research and theory on self-esteem…

Factor analysis of a 1978 survey of St. Louis shows that different age, race, and educational attainment segments have approximately the same patterns of interest, participation, and enjoyment in leisure activities. Leisure activities of four types of fine arts activities--arts, music-dance, visual arts, and nonarts types--are described.…

Different types of time-series data sets can be used to identify cultural change and continuity. Indicators, including musical instruments, clothing, sporting goods, drugs, garbage, telephones, and magazines, are used to study social change since World War II. (Author/RM)

The authors isolate seven patterns of cultural choice using a cluster analysis of a multidimensional scale of items from a 1977 survey of leisure activities in the South. They then use regression analysis to isolate the social demographic correlates of the clusters. (Author/RM)

Using a multiple-indicator multiple-cause model to analyze a 1972-73 national survey of consumer expenditures, the author isolates four patterns of spending on leisure activities and identifies the social and demographic characteristics of people exhibiting each pattern. (Author/RM)

Challenges the view that the social sciences are theoretically impoverished disciplines when compared with the natural sciences. Demonstrates that the synthesis of an abstract Darwinian model of systemic adaptation and the behavioral principles of social learning produces a logical theory of sociocultural evolution. (DB)

Concludes that subjects with considerable prior exposure to common, nonviolent pornography preferred to watch uncommon pornography. Male nonstudents preferred it almost exclusively, as did male students to a lesser extent. Females also exhibited this consumption preference, though it was far less pronounced, especially in female students. (JD)

Eight patterns of cultural choice, isolated from data collected in a 1973 national survey using a hand-crafted clustering technique, cannot be arranged in hierarchical order by social class, bringing into question the hypothesized association between culture class and social class. (Author/RM)

Discusses results of a study of computer programers which assessed the emotional and social needs met by their interaction with computers, programers, and nonprogrammers. Since a significant portion of respondents expressed preference for computer interaction, an examination of needs fulfilled by computer interaction is presented, and societal…

The biological and the cultural aspects of human play are inextricably linked and mutually influence each other. (LH)

At present, art-educational research seems locked into a number of unexamined assumptions--largely derived from European Romantic ideology--about artistic productiveness as a desirable psychological trait. We need to know more about other cultural patterns of artistic behavior and the historic and social factors that influence them. (Author/SJL)