Book Reading # 6 - Coming of Age in Samoa

Chapter 2: The Psychology of Everyday Actions

Summary
Mead describes a regular day in the Samoan life. She describes with detail the daily activities that each family member performs from sunrise until the day is over. She describes the customs of everyone ranging from the children to the elders. In this chapter she is starting to give an idea of how this Samoan culture is.
Discussion
I think Mead does a great job describing what each group of people does during the entire day. She starts introducing some of the customs that she is observing. She is starting to observe some sort of hierarchy in the Samoan culture.

Appendix II: Methodology of this Survey

Summary
In this chapter, Mead describes that she used translator in order to interact with the Samoan girls since they did not speak English. This is an advantage as they is no language barrier in collecting information and speaking to the girls. She gathers personal information through a questionnaire.
Discussion
I think it is greatly beneficial that she is using translator to get as much information as possible through her questionnaire without having the language as a barrier. This speaks that Mead wants her acquired data to be as accurate as possible.

Appendix V: Materials Upon Which the Analysis is Based

Summary
In this chapter the data collected from the personal interviews is shown. Some of the information she collected was social and sexual interaction of each of the girls, family and the test topics Mead gave to the girls.
Discussion
I like the idea that Mead shows tables as her gathered information because tables are very pictorial way to represent the data she collected, it is an easy way for a reader to understand results. It is interesting how Mead was able to gather very personal data from the Samoan girls given that Mead was an intruder to their culture.