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World Revolution and Family Patterns. W J. Goode. New York: Free Press. 1963.
This book, as one reviewer (Slater, 1964: 287) admiringly wrote at the time, was indeed a tour de force. Directing what must have been a hardworking staff, William J. Goode collected, organized, and wrote the huge mass of material available four decades ago on family lives in what he labeled the cultural areas of Arabic Islam, SubSaharan Africa, India, China, Japan, and the West (the "New World," Europe west of the Urals, Australia, and New Zealand). Looking back from the perspective of what we know about today's families, it remains a remarkable compilation, although the revolution Goode wrote of then has continued, outdating much of his material and conclusions. Nonetheless, nothing comparable has appeared in the interim, and the book continues to be cited-16 times in 1995, for example, according to the Psychological Abstracts.
Goode, thanks to his diligent staff, appears to have had knowledge of just about every available survey at that time with some family relevance. He chose to include the results regardless of their sample sizes and representativeness. This can make for hard going for someone attempting to find out what the author thought was going on in families of that era. And Goode, himself, wrote in his preface (p. v), how "presumptuous" is his undertaking, presumably because of its size and lack of documentation. He recognized and often commented on the poor quality of much of the data he had, as well as its complete absence with respect to a number of issues. Fortunately, Goode occasionally attempted to draw some conclusions from his voluminous data and make some predictions as to what the future might hold for families in...