Robert A Levine
Biographic Data
| ID | 75575 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Robert A Levine |
| GIVEN NAMES | Robert A |
| FAMILY NAME | Levine |
| SIGNATURE | LEVINE R A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Harvard University Press |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0270-1877 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 92 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 949 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 92 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1959 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2017 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
Women’s Schooling in Asia and Africa
This article surveys the demographic research of the past 35 years concerning the impact of women’s school attainment on mortality, fertility and health practices. The empirical findings are remarkably consistent across Asia, Africa and Latin America, and in the 20th and 21st centuries, with evident associations between female primary and secondary school attainment and child mortality in the Gakidou et al. (2010) study of 175 countries. Associat…
Women's Schooling and Literacy
Culture and Personality
Culture and personality" (also known as "personality and culture" and "culture-and-personality studies") was an interdisciplinary movement seeking to unite psychology with anthropology in American social science of the mid-20th century. The movement gained exceptional renown and then fell into disrepute in the decades after 1950, while nevertheless providing a basis for modern psychological anthropology. The movement was initiated by three studen…
Dr. Robert A. LeVine, 2015 Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry Honoree
Exploration of Preterm Birth Rates Using the Public Health Exposome Database and Computational Analysis Methods
Recent advances in informatics technology has made it possible to integrate, manipulate, and analyze variables from a wide range of scientific disciplines allowing for the examination of complex social problems such as health disparities. This study used 589 county-level variables to identify and compare geographical variation of high and low preterm birth rates. Data were collected from a number of publically available sources, bringing together…
Dr. Robert A. LeVine, 2015 Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry Honoree
Traditions in Transition
This article proposes a cohort-based theoretical model of understanding adolescence as a key moment in the intersection of individual and cultural change. Drawing on work from anthropology, psychology, and sociology, adolescence is shown to be a critical time for examining the proximate interactions of individuals with the cultural models and norms transmitted to them in the re-creation of new generational norms and practices. Examples are provid…
Commentary
Commentaries| January 08 2010 Commentary Subject Area: Psychiatry and Psychology , Women's and Children's Health Robert A. LeVine; Robert A. LeVine Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., USA Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Patrice M. Miller Patrice M. Miller Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., USA Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Human Development (1990) 33 (1): 7…
Commentary
A person‐centered ethnography of mothering begins with the mother's point of view, reconstructed in terms of its utilitarian and semiotic components, and proceeds to the child's point of view, which is more difficult to detect. The child's culture‐specific precocious behavior can provide indications of earlier experience. Other methodological and interpretive problems are briefly discussed in terms of the articles in the issue: discontinuities in…
The Six Cultures Study
The Six Cultures Study of Socialization (SCSS), launched in the middle of the 20th century, was an unprecedented cross-cultural project of field research on child rearing and development in diverse settings. Nothing quite so ambitious has been attempted since then-more than 50 years on-so the SCSS deserves scholars' attention as an historical landmark that inspired future work and exemplifies the possibilities and problems of comparative research…
Toward a Psychology of Populations
Research Articles| December 17 2009 Toward a Psychology of Populations: The Cross-Cultural Study of Personality Subject Area: Psychiatry and Psychology , Women's and Children's Health R.A. LeVine R.A. LeVine Chicago, III. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Human Development (1966) 9 (1-2): 30–46. https://doi.org/10.1159/000270367 Article history Published Online: December 17 2009 Content Tools Views Icon Vie…
Re-Visualizing Childhood in Cultural Context
Ethnographic Studies of Childhood
In this article, I briefly survey the ethnographic research literature on childhood in the 20th century, beginning with the social and intellectual contexts for discussions of childhood at the turn of the 20th century. The observations of Bronislaw Malinowski and Margaret Mead in the 1920s were followed by later ethnographers, also describing childhood, some of whom criticized developmental theories; still others were influenced initially by Freu…
Anthropological and Sociological Perspectives on the Study of Children
Levy's Tahitians
Robert I. Levyapos;s 1973 book Tahitians: Mind and Experience in the Society Islands was a landmark study in the ethnopsychology of a non-Western culture, explicating not only the terms in which Tahitians experience mental phenomena but also the historical and contemporaneous contexts of social action and interaction that give those terms their cultural meanings and psychological salience. This article briefly reviews the features that distinguis…
Assimilating Immigrants
The United States and France differ greatly in their responses to mass immigration. The U.S. adapts is own culture and that of the immigrants, most recently with Latinos. France wants the immigrants to do it all. As a result, the Muslim North Africans of France's first wave of mass immigration are not assimilating well. The author compares the two current cases and briefly discusses the policy implications: The U.S. seems on its best course, but …
Literacy as a pathway between schooling and health-related communication skills
Maternal literacy and health behavior
Populations, Communication and Child Development
A population psychology would provide empirical connections between individual differences studied under controlled conditions and the naturally occurring ecological parameters involved in transforming genotypes into phenotypes. Evidence from child development research indicates that the communicative environment of the child is the place to look for such parameters, which are located in communicative codes of symbolic meaning that children learn…
Contexts and culture in psychological research
Previous chapters in this volume outline a new methodology of achievement motivation, an approach that seeks to indentify the cultural and personal meanings of educational performance through methods that clarify its multiple contexts
"Improve the Women"
In this article, Robert LeVine, Sarah LeVine, and Beatrice Schnell develop and test a theoretical model of how women's schooling might contribute to social and demographic change. Drawing upon research from many disciplines, the authors propose that schooling leads to social change by imparting skills and fostering other individual changes that alter women's patterns of social participation. They argue that, in schools, girls acquire aspirations,…
Culture and Personality Studies, 1918-1960
The field known as "culture and personality studies" in the middle decades of the 20th century was a precursor of contemporary cross-cultural research on personality. Its rejection by anthropologists and sociologists after 1950 was accompanied by stereotypes that have hardened into myth and obscured its character and relevance for contemporary investigators. This article dispels some prevalent misconceptions (concerning its chronology, its theore…
The Schooling of Women
Beatrice Whiting was a member of the first generation of graduate students to be trained in psychological anthropology, and she has always presumed a broad range of connections between psychological and social processes. She salvaged the Six Cultures Study through an ecological analysis of its child-observation material, and she stimulated further studies, using quantitative and qualitative methods, of the ways in which broad categories like sex,…
Eine Landkarte der Zeit
Nyansongo, a Gusii community in Kenya
Culture theory
Ethnographic Studies of Childhood
In this article, I briefly survey the ethnographic research literature on childhood in the 20th century, beginning with the social and intellectual contexts for discussions of childhood at the turn of the 20th century. The observations of Bronislaw Malinowski and Margaret Mead in the 1920s were followed by later ethnographers, also describing childhood, some of whom criticized developmental theories; still others were influenced initially by Freu…
Dreams and Deeds
Cultural and educational variations in maternal responsiveness
Two separate studies examined the following hypotheses: (a) that maternal responsiveness is af-fected by cross-cultural differences in conventions of conversational interaction, and (b) that ma-ternal responsiveness is affected by intracultural differences in mothers ' levels of formal education. The first study compared mother-infant interactions among the Gusii of Kenya with those in suburban Boston, Massachusetts. The second study, carried out…
Cultural Dimensions
This research (a) scales quantitatively the 30 cultural characteristics of Murdock's (1957) World Ethnographic Sample, (b) correlates them over all 565 societies, (c) factors these correlations, to show that nine dimensions largely summarize the original 30 characteristics, and (d) repeats the correlation and factoring separately in all six cultural regions, to show that these characteristics are related at least partly because of functional nece…
Gusii Sex Offenses
Women's Schooling and Child Care in the Demographic Transition
THE QUESTION OF HOW FEMALE SCHOOL ATTENDANCE influences fertility and child survival in developing countries has emerged as an important problem in the analysis of demographic change and the evaluation of health and population policies. An extensive research literature based on national surveys and censuses conducted in developing countries shows maternal schooling to be a highly consistent household-level predictor of reduced fertility and child…
Patterns of Personality in Africa
Culture and Personality Studies, 1918-1960
The field known as "culture and personality studies" in the middle decades of the 20th century was a precursor of contemporary cross-cultural research on personality. Its rejection by anthropologists and sociologists after 1950 was accompanied by stereotypes that have hardened into myth and obscured its character and relevance for contemporary investigators. This article dispels some prevalent misconceptions (concerning its chronology, its theore…
Maternal literacy and health behavior
A proposal for cooperative cross-cultural research on ethnocentrism
The research setting envisaged is primarily that of anthropological field work, with ethnographers being encouraged to extend their data collection program to include this content, where not already a part of their scheduled activity. In this sense, first, the proposal is for cooperative research. To justify such cooperation in field work as well as for other reasons, it has seemed desirable to
Culture and Personality
Culture and Personality brings together some of the best culture and personalitystudies from the 1960s and 1970s. It offers illuminating views of a field thatis interdisciplinary in nature within the social and behavioral sciences, definedprimarily by its attention to behavioral differences between populations, thedevelopment in the individual of psychological dispositions accounting forsuch differences, and their relationships to social and cult…
Anthropology and the study of of conflict
Ethnographers have long been recording instances of warfare, feuding, factionalism, and sorcery, but theoretical attention to social conflict is relatively new in anthropology. Recent theoretical work by anthropologists on this subject has been influenced primarily by the structural-functional theory of social systems and indirectly by the psychoanalytic theory of personality (including its behavioristic revision in the frustration-aggression hyp…
Dream Concepts of Hausa Children
Children's Kinship Concepts
The Diffusion of Age-Group Organization in East Africa
Opening ParagraphThe ethnography of Kenya and Tanganyika presents a problem of great significance to the study of culture history and social organization: why have some Bantu-speaking peoples adopted age-group organization and associated rituals from their non-Bantu neighbours, while other Bantu peoples in the same region have not? That this borrowing has occurred in some cases is suggested by the extant ethnographic literature. Wagner states tha…
Women's Schooling, Patterns of Fertility, and Child Survival
Evidence that women's schooling is associated with lower fertility and child mortality has moved some population specialists to advocate expanding female school enrollment to reduce birth and child death rates in countries where they are high. Consistent findings relating years of school attendance to reproductive rates, however, are not matched by an understanding of educational processes. This article provides an overview of the demographic evi…
Witchcraft and Co-Wife Proximity in Southwestern Kenya
Gusii Funerals
Sex Roles and Economic Change in Africa
The Six Cultures Study
The Six Cultures Study of Socialization (SCSS), launched in the middle of the 20th century, was an unprecedented cross-cultural project of field research on child rearing and development in diverse settings. Nothing quite so ambitious has been attempted since then-more than 50 years on-so the SCSS deserves scholars' attention as an historical landmark that inspired future work and exemplifies the possibilities and problems of comparative research…
Literacy as a pathway between schooling and health-related communication skills
An Agenda for Psychological Anthropology
Child care in India
Child care in India is influenced by the sociodemographic condition of the society and the sociocultural environment in extended households
The Poor Ye Need Not Have With You
Anti-European violence in Africa
of anti-European rioting: in the Belgian Congo, January, 1959; in South Africa and Nyasaland in 1953; in Nigeria in 1950; and in the Gold Coast in 1948. Considering the intensity of anticolonial feeling and the amount of nationalist activity, this is a phenomenal record of non-violence. It is particularly noteworthy in light of the fact that African tribal and regional groups have often engaged in violence against each other, both traditionally a…
An Attempt to Change the Gusii Initiation Cycle
Gusii Sex Offenses
Ethnology and Ethnography
A proposal for cooperative cross-cultural research on ethnocentrism
The research setting envisaged is primarily that of anthropological field work, with ethnographers being encouraged to extend their data collection program to include this content, where not already a part of their scheduled activity. In this sense, first, the proposal is for cooperative research. To justify such cooperation in field work as well as for other reasons, it has seemed desirable to
Anthropology and the study of of conflict
Ethnographers have long been recording instances of warfare, feuding, factionalism, and sorcery, but theoretical attention to social conflict is relatively new in anthropology. Recent theoretical work by anthropologists on this subject has been influenced primarily by the structural-functional theory of social systems and indirectly by the psychoanalytic theory of personality (including its behavioristic revision in the frustration-aggression hyp…
Becoming More Civilized
Facts and Morals in the Arms Debate
Of the several public dialogues currently being carried on in the United States, the controversy over military strength and disarmament may be both the most important and the most confusing. Its importance is obvious; it is an interesting commentary on the vital nature of armament-disarmament policy that the literature in the field is burgeoning almost as fast as the literature about the Civil War on its 100th anniversary. But, if the importance …
Arms agreement
In reviewing the efforts of the past decade and a half to limit by international agreement the numbers and uses of military weapons, one theme dominates all othersthat of failure. Over the entire period, little progress has been made toward any agreement which would limit any significant aspect of armaments. This paper is an enquiry into the underlying causes of this stalemate, in the hope that analysis of these causes may assist in finding paths…
Witchcraft and Co-Wife Proximity in Southwestern Kenya
The Diffusion of Age-Group Organization in East Africa
Opening ParagraphThe ethnography of Kenya and Tanganyika presents a problem of great significance to the study of culture history and social organization: why have some Bantu-speaking peoples adopted age-group organization and associated rituals from their non-Bantu neighbours, while other Bantu peoples in the same region have not? That this borrowing has occurred in some cases is suggested by the extant ethnographic literature. Wagner states tha…
In Place of Parents
The Arms Debate
Principal Economic Considerations in the Formulation of National Security Policy
Cooperative Cross-Cultural Study of Ethnocentrism
Sex Roles and Economic Change in Africa
Cultural Dimensions
This research (a) scales quantitatively the 30 cultural characteristics of Murdock's (1957) World Ethnographic Sample, (b) correlates them over all 565 societies, (c) factors these correlations, to show that nine dimensions largely summarize the original 30 characteristics, and (d) repeats the correlation and factoring separately in all six cultural regions, to show that these characteristics are related at least partly because of functional nece…
Outsiders' Judgments
Dreams and Deeds
Ethnology
Brief Communications and Letters
Response to Segall's Comments on “Psycho-Social Studies in Africa”
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Psycho-Social Studies in Africa
Psychological explanations of social behavior are currently unfashionable in the institutional social sciences of economics, history, sociology and social anthropology--though political science is something of an exception--and it is these disciplines that dominate African and other area studies. Received opinion has it that psycho-social studies of the cultulre and personality or national character type were discredited during the 1940's and ear…
Two models of the urban crisis
The Silent Majority
Journal Article THE SILENT MAJORITY: NEITHER SIMPLE NOR SIMPLE-MINDED Get access ROBERT A. LEVINE ROBERT A. LEVINE The author is Director of the Urban Policy Analysis Program and Associate Head of the Economics Department at the Rand Corporation. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Public Opinion Quarterly, Volume 35, Issue 4, WINTER 1971, Pages 571–577, https://doi.org/10.1086/267953 Published: 01 January 197…
Sociology (60 works) · Psychology (44 works) · Political science (41 works) · Law (19 works) · Anthropology (18 works) · Computer Science (18 works) · History (18 works) · Social Psychology (16 works) · Developmental psychology (15 works) · Geography (15 works)