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Rohrer and Edmonson, and their colleagues at the Urban Life Research Institute of Tulane University, have laudably undertaken a follow-up study, twenty years later, of a group of Negro adolescents in New Orleans originally studied by Davis and Dollard, whose book of 1940, Children of Bondage, is a little-known classic in its
field. The original Davis and Dollard work concluded that for both Negroes and whites modes of personality functioning follow lines of social class rather than color-caste membership. Ten years later, Kardiner and Ovesey, in a study of a smaller sample of New York Negroes, concluded that color-caste, not social class, produces a distinct Negro personality type. Others, especially Allport, express the belief that extreme importance in personality organization should be imputed neither to class nor caste membership alone: to do so is to overlook the basic uniqueness of human personality, to ignore the obvious relevance of inherited differences in temperament and the idiosyncratic nature of life experience in a particular family, to discount the fact that all persons are a dynamic complex of potential 'selves', and to contradict the common observation that widely ramified social roles and memberships can overlap in a conflict-free fashion.
Rohrer and Edmonson are to be commended for their avoidance of sweeping generalization. Not so praiseworthy is their too limited approach: they state that they tried to ascertain '… separately for each subject the possibility that race, religion, political position, profession, class, sex, age, or intellect might be the dimension [reviewer's italics] of his primary role identification …' (p. 83). Moreover, only forty-seven of the original seventy-six adolescents were located and studied, and too few of those coöperating with the follow-up were of lower class origin. Of the forty-seven subjects, twenty were studied by psychological tests, psychiatric interviews, and home visits. The authors do not give a