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A descriptive analysis of how ideologically determined premises have distorted sociological research on the family & human sexuality. Efforts in Sweden & GB to use social science to guide the creation of family policies are reviewed, with focus on the work of Swedish social scientists Alva & Gunnar Myrdal in the 1930s & of GB's Royal Commission on Population during the 1940s. Certain common methodological premises are identified: freeing sociological inquiry from institutional & cultural restraints; an assumption of the "natural marriage" of the correct technical & the political radical solution; the denial of any need to discover the specific causes of the social problems under investigation; a materialistic, nonhistoric understanding of social change; & the necessary use of state power to alter existing social arrangements to produce the desired structural results. Logical difficulties plaguing these assumptions are explored. The components of the US family policy that existed & worked reasonably well in 1947-1962 are considered, including family-sensitive tax benefits, housing programs that encouraged home ownership, & the presumptions concerning family structure around which the Social Security system was shaped. The dissolution of the consensus underlying these policies is traced to the 1965 Moynihan Report on "The Negro Family," viewed as a principle catalyst for change. Subsequent radical transformations in sociological theory concerning the family are shown to have been ideologically determined. Recent proposals for creation of a US family policy, showing how they share the same logical inconsistencies & ideologically determined content of the earlier Swedish & British policy experiments are analyzed, & suggestions made for creation of a family political agenda restoring "the policy balance existing in the 1950s which embodied a positive social valuation of families & childern." Modified AA.

Contents -- Introduction -- Survey Design and Analysis in Sociology / Charles Y. Glock -- Survey Research in Political Science / Herbert McClosky -- The Practice and Potential of Survey Methods in Psychological Research / Daniel Katz -- Contributions of Survey Research to Economics / James N. Morgan -- Sociocultural Anthropology and Survey Research / John W. Bennett and Gustav Thaiss -- Education and Survey Research / Martin Trow -- The Survey Method in Social Work: Past, Present, and Potential / Fred Massarik -- The Survey Method Applied to Public Health and Medicine / Edward A. Suchman

Sport is one of the most ubiquitous activities of modern contemporary society. The pervasiveness of sport can be seen by the enormous amount of primary and second ary involvement in it by people of all ages and social strata. Sport penetrates into and plays a significant role in all of the social institutions. The functions of play, games, and sport is a major theme running through much of the work of social scientists. Although there is no definitive list, there are seven major categories of functions of play, games, and sport: in stinct, developmental-cognitive, mastery, social integration, socialization, social control, and personal-expressive. There is a substantial body of literature in the social sciences discussing the importance of each of these functions.