Future Meeting Sites

Members voted to (1) accept a previous proposal (from the 1995 meeting) to meet in St. Petersburg in 1998 and return to Santa Fe in 1999 and (2) appoint a committee (consisting of Lee Munroe and Bill Divale) to select 4-6 cities for possible rotation. President Abbott is working on the appointment of a site committee for the meeting in 2000.

Election and Poll Results

Uwe Gielen was elected as Incoming President and Leonore Loeb Adler as Psychology Representative. The results of the poll on meeting sites are as follows:

Do you want to meet repeatedly in

Santa Fe: yes 20 no 3 NR 5
Puerto Rico: yes 11 no 3 NR 13

(NR = no response)

(Some voters pointed out that airfare from locations not on the east coast to Puerto Rico is very expensive.)

How often do you want to meet in Santa Fe?

every year: 0
every 2nd year: 11
every 3rd year: 6

How often do you want to meet in Puerto Rico?

every year: 0
every 2nd year: 5
every 3rd year: 3
every 4th year :1

Should meeting sites reflect the geographical distribution of the membership?

Yes: 18
No: 9

Some confusion resulted from the fact that some members gave conflicting votes. They voted to meet repeatedly in Santa Fe and Puerto Rico but said that sites should reflect the geographical distribution of SCCR members.

Suggestions offered for consideration of future meeting sites were: (1) plan two years in advance and widely publicize our meetings in order to attract more attendees. (2) rotate meetings through 4-5 "southern tier cities" with the advantage that hotels would become familiar with us and our needs and we could establish on-going relationships with local universities and colleges in order to increase interest and attendance at annual meetings.

Nominating Committee

President Abbott has appointed Judith Gibbons and Robert Veneziano to assist Past-President Lew Hendrix in the selection of officers for 1998.

Membership

Discussion at the business meeting focused on possible ways to increase membership and diversity in the Society. Copies of the new SCCR brochure were displayed and members were encouraged to take copies to give to potential members. Other suggestions included (1) each member trying to recruit at least one additional member, (2) developing a list of similar organizations and distributing information about the SCCR and its meetings, newsletter, etc to them via e-mail, and (3) distributing of brochures to universities and colleges.

Meeting Programs and Participation

Much discussion focused on how to better plan and organize our annual meetings and ways we might increase participation. Suggestions were made including the following:

1. Develop an overall theme for the meetings with several sub-themes. Al Pepitone recommended that the president-elect, Uwe Gielen, solicit suggestions for themes from the membership.

2. Susan Abbott made several suggestions (a) Encourage greater cross-discipline discussion by identifying an interesting and important problem and inviting a panel to address it from a variety of perspectives (anthropology, psychology, sociology, etc), (b) develop key symposia for which papers would have to be submitted with selections made by Board members and papers published in SCCR, (c) send the call for papers out earlier with an October deadline for acceptance, (d) contact surrounding universities and colleges and informing them of the meetings. (Susan said she had sent information to dozens of institutions throughout Texas and surrounding states for this meeting and, although it appeared to produce few results, it should be continued).

3. Jim Starr said that Susan's use of Roundtables worked very well at this meeting and should be considered as part of future meetings, and other members agreed.

4. Bill Divale suggested that members should try to bring graduate students to meetings (as several did this time) and perhaps they could be provided with less expensive rooms in which three could share. He also suggested trying to establish closer connections with local universities and colleges.

5. Gary Chick suggested exploring opportunities to hold joint meetings with other groups e.g. the Association for the Study of Play or the Network group. He volunteered to look into the possibility of meeting with "the play group" at the 1998 or 1999 annual meeting and report back to the Society.

Sage SCCR Contract

The five year contract (1993-1997) with Sage for publication of the Cross-Cultural Research journal is up and needs to be renegotiated. We are currently contracted for 200 copies of SCCR and, due to low membership, have consistently had unused copies of each issue. It was suggested that the Treasurer (Harry Gardiner) try to renegotiate the contract for a low of 125 copies and a high of 150 copies. He indicated he would attempt to do this. Mel Ember suggested we have a promotion ("fire sale") to get rid of back issues e.g. "join now and get a free set of last year's issues." (One person took advantage of this promotion and signed up at the close of the business meeting.)

Books by SCCR Members

Marshall Segall is an editor (along with John Berry and Cigdem Kagitcibasi) of "Social Behavior and Applications" which is Vol. 3 of "Handbook of Cross-Cultural Psychology" (Allyn & Bacon, 1997). This book contains a chapter on aggression, crime, and warfare, written by Segall with Carol Ember and Melvin Ember. The volume, in addition to updating topics in the 1980 Handbook, features now chapters that explore how biology and socialization interact to shape gender roles, inter-gender relationships, and aggressive behavior. Chapters on acculturation, cross-cultural training and education, and management and organizational behavior present research resulting from increased inter-cultural contact through worker migration, refugee populations, inter- cultural education opportunities and the global economy. Pancultural similarities and differences across cultures are noted in many areas and summarized in an overview written by Segall and Kagitcibasi. The Segall, Ember, and Ember chapter contains many references to hologeistic research.

Harry Gardiner, Jay Mutter, Corinne Kosmitzki; Lives Across Cultures: Cross Cultural Perspectives on Human Development; Allyn & Bacon, 352 pages $24 available summer of 1997

Fatjali M. Moghaddam: A Specialized Society: The Plight on the Individual in an Age of Individualism; Greenwood Publishing, 200 pages $55 available 03/30/97

Summer Institute

The Institute will be held at Claremont Colleges, Claremont, California from June 21 to August 12. The directors and principal instructors will be Carol R. Ember, Michael L. Burton and Robert Munroe. Twelve participants will be accepted for the three-week intensive course in the design and execution of systematic comparisons.

Meetings

JEAN PIAGET SOCIETY

SOCIETY FOR THE STUDY OF KNOWLEDGE AND DEVELOPMENT

Twenty-Seventh Annual Symposium
June 19-21, 1997

Theo Linda Dawson, Graduate School of Education, Tolman Hall
University of California at Berkeley
(510) 849-2217, FAX: (510) 849-2917

Holiday Inn Bayview Plaza, Santa Monica, California
Tel: (310) 399-9344, FAX: (310) 399-3322

XIV Congress of the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology

Western State University, Washington
August 3-8 1998

For information contact:

Walter J. Lonner
Center for Cross-Cultural Research
Miller Hall 328A
Western Washington University
Bellingham, Washington 98225-9089

Ph: +1(360)650-3574; Fax: +1(360)650-3693

For complete information, including the call for papers, go to the Congress Web site at: http://www.wwu.edu/~lonner/congress.html

The 24th International Congress of Applied Psychology

San Francisco, California, USA
August 9-14 1998

for information contact:

Scientific Program Committee, ICAP
American Psychological Association
750 First St., NE
Washington DC 20002-4242 (USA)

FAX: (202-)336-5956, e-mail: icap@apa.org

Obituary

RUTH HAGBERG MUNROE died October 22, 1996 after a long illness. At the time of her death she was Research Professor of Psychology at Pitzer College in Claremont, California. Her teaching career began at Pitzer in 1964 as one of the founding faculty of that institution. She taught there until 1990. In 1983 she received the Pitzer College Alumni Association award for Academic Excellence. And in 1996 the college established the Ruth and Lee Munroe Laboratory for Cross-Cultural Research in recognition of their "unrelenting efforts to engage students in that research." As Valerie Havill wrote in the Pitzer College Gazette, quoting Sally Nerlove's remarks about Ruth's mentoring of students: "She gave them roots, and she gave them wings."

Ruth spent her formative years in Ohio. Born in Youngstown, in 1930, she grew up in nearby Poland. She attended Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, graduating in 1953. Her graduate training was at the Graduate School of Education at Harvard, where she received an M.Ed. in measurement and statistics and later (in 1964) an Ed.D. in human development. John and Beatrice Whiting were significant influences on her research career. It was at Harvard that she met and married Robert (Lee) Munroe, who became her research partner for the rest of her life.

Ruth was author or co-author of almost 100 articles, book chapters, and books. Among those most widely known are the two editions of Cross-Cultural Human Development written by the Munroes (1975, 1994) and the Handbook of Cross-Cultural Human Development (1981) edited by the Munroes and Beatrice Whiting. She did fieldwork in a variety of countries and cultures: Belize (Garifuna), Kenya (primarily among the Logoli), American Samoa, and Nepal (Newars). Her research spanned a wide variety of topics including cognitive development, gender differences, infant care, children's work, sex-role identification, dreams, mothering and fathering, gender in language, and the frequency of consonant/vowel syllables in a language. As these topics indicate, Ruth had very diverse intellectual interests, and always vigorously and rigorously applied her talents to the design of hypothesis-testing research. For her contributions to the cross-cultural study of human development, Ruth was interviewed for the Society for Research in Child Development's Oral History Project; the interviews will be deposited in the SRCD Archives in the National Library of Medicine.

A list of topics that Ruth was interested in does not do justice to her contributions to psychology and anthropology. In particular, she and Lee have been strong advocates of multi-level cross-cultural research, including parallel within-culture comparisons of individuals, comparisons of grouped individual data across cultures, and comparisons of ethnographic data across cultures. A classic example of their approach can be found in their work on female identification in males, which may be displayed as individual behavior in a husband's pregnancy symptomatology (e.g., nausea and food cravings while their wives are pregnant) and/or in customary couvade-like practices such as males avoiding the lifting of heavy things during a wife's postnatal recovery. For her dissertation, Ruth studied male pregnancy symptomatology in Boston; for his dissertation, Lee studied individual variation in couvade-like practices among the Garifuna of Belize. They also (with John Whiting) conducted a cross- cultural comparison that predicted which societies should have couvade-like practices. On an individual level, the Munroes found that either early father- absence (Boston) or early male absence (Garifuna) males were likely to have pregnancy symptoms in Boston, Garifuna, and several cultures in Kenya; on a cultural level, matrilocal societies with low father-salience in infancy are particularly likely to have couvade-like practices.

Ruth and Lee paid close attention to issues of measurement in cross-cultural contexts and they have been especially creative in inventing efficient techniques for measuring adult behavior, abilities, and feelings. In the couvade/pregnancy symptomatology work they found multiple ways to measure cross-sex identification, including the semantic differential and the use of "male" and "female" words in translation tasks. They also pioneered psychological measures of infants and children that can be used in all cultures. For example, using spot observations, they have looked at how far children venture from home (as a measure of psychological security) and how frequently children gaze at males versus females (as a measure of attentiveness to gender). In longitudinal research among the Logoli they used preference for smiling faces versus non-smiling faces (as a measure of optimism) to see if more frequent mother-holding in infancy created more optimism in five-year old children. They likened the positive relationship between mother-holding and optimism in Logoli to the cross-cultural relationship between indulgence and benevolent gods.

Ruth was Secretary-General (1986-1992) of the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology (IACCP) and in 1996 was made an Honorary Fellow of that association. Colleagues in that society remember her insistence on traveling to Liege, Belgium in 1992 to take care of her responsibilities as Secretary-General even though she was frail. She also came to many meetings of the Society for Cross-Cultural Research, although in recent years she could not attend as often as she would have liked. The last time she attended (1992) she co-organized and co-chaired an all-day session in honor of John and Beatrice Whiting.

At the 1997 meeting of the Society of Cross- Cultural Research, in a Quaker-style session, friends and colleagues reminisced about her warmth in welcoming new researchers to the Society, her unfailing interest in talking to others (about their latest research or about their personal lives and tastes), her courage in fighting her illness, and her tireless devotion to the research enterprise. No matter what she talked to others about, you could always see her incisive mind at work, thinking about causes, consequences, and possible new research.

Our last visits with Ruth were during the summer of 1996 while we were in Claremont for the Summer Institute in Comparative Anthropological Research. Even though she was not well, she wanted the participants to come to a party at her house. The last time we saw her she had recently come home from the hospital. We all--Lee and Ruth and we--were preparing to write a paper together, dealing with a question that she and Lee had been the first to investigate cross- culturally (with the help of a student, Stephen Winters). They had discovered predictors of the frequency of consonant-vowel syllables in a language (see their paper in the February 1996 issue of Cross- Cultural Research), and we had found another predictor. Until the end, she still displayed her passionate devotion to science, and she was able to question us in her inimitable no-nonsense way.

If she were still with us, Ruth would probably say, "Enough of this! Get back to work!" And so we will.

Carol and Melvin Ember

Obituary published in Cross-Cultural Psychology Bulletin.

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