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Middletown studies were sociological case studies of the City of Muncie in Indiana conducted by Robert Staughton Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, husband-and-wife sociologists. The Lynds' findings were detailed in ''Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture'', published in 1929, and ''Middletown in Transition : A Study in Cultural Conflicts'', published in 1937. They wrote in their first book: :"The city will be called Middletown. A community as small as thirty-odd thousand...(which ) the field staff was enabled to concentrate on cultural change...the interplay of a relatively constant...American stock and its changing environment" (1929: p. 8). The word "middletown" was meant to suggest the average or typical American small city. While there are many places in the U.S. actually named Middletown (in Connecticut, in New Jersey, in New York, in Ohio and elsewhere), the Lynds were interested in an idealized conceptual American type, and concealed the identity of the city by referring to it by this term. Sometime after publication, however, the residents of Muncie began to guess that their town had been the subject of the book. The Lynds and a group of researchers conducted an in-depth field research study of a small American urban center to discover key cultural norms and better understand social change. The first study was conducted during the prosperous 1920s, beginning in January 1924, while the second was written, with far less fieldwork, late in the Great Depression in the United States. ==Overview of ''Middletown: A Study in American Culture'' ()== Middletown: A Study in American Culture was primarily a look at changes in a typical American city between 1890 and 1925, a period of great economic change. The Lynds used the "approach of the cultural anthropologist" (see field research and social anthropology), existing documents, statistics, old newspapers, interviews, and surveys to accomplish this task. The stated goal of the study was to describe this small urban center as a unit which consists of "interwoven trends of behavior" (p. 3). Or put in more detail, :"to present a dynamic, functional study of the contemporary life of this specific American community in the light of trends of changing behaviour observable in it during the last thirty-five years" (p. 6). The book is written in an entirely descriptive tone, treating the citizens of Middletown in much the same way as an anthropologist from an industrialized nation might describe a non-industrial culture. Following anthropologist W. H. R. Rivers' classic ''Social Organization'', the Lynds write that the study proceeded "under the assumption that all the things people do in this American city may be viewed as falling under one or another of the following six main-trunk activities: : * getting a living : * making a home : * training the young : * using leisure in various forms of play, art, and so on : * engaging in religious practices : * engaging in community activities 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Middletown studies」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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