This book discusses the characteristics of adolescence cross-culturally and examines the differences in the adolescent experience for males and females. Several relationships are tested in order to gain an understanding of cross-cultural patterns in adolescence.

Textor summarizes cross-cultural findings on adolescence gender separation pertaining to cultural, environmental, psychological, and social phenomena.

This paper is concerned with the variation in sexual behavior in humans. Authors test hypotheses regarding the relationships between sexual behaviors and beliefs concerning sex.

The author attempts to test the "Oedipus-complex" hypothesis--the psychoanalytic idea that under certain conditions (such as the long-post partum sex taboo) males are sexually attracted to their mothers and as a consequence certain fears and anxiety are generaated. The hypothesis is tested at the societal-level using ethnographic data.

The present examination utilizes life history theory to explain how adolescence may have been transformed in recent times by mass education. The researchers review existing literature and also look at 186 pre-industrial societies from the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample to establish a baseline as to how adolescence was viewed and marked. The findings reveal adolescence is an essential period for biological and sociocultural development in the past as well as the present.

Textor summarizes cross-cultural findings on the status of women in relation to cultural, environmental, psychological, and social phenomena.

Cultures vary widely in regards to beauty standards for female body fat: while industrialized nations typically prefer thinness in women, ethnographic reports indicate that plumpness is valued in many small-scale societies. Here the authors evaluate several hypotheses that relate variation in female body fat preference to variation in socioecology such as food storage, climate, male social dominance, valuation and restriction of women's work, and female stress during adolescence.

The theoretical concern of this work is with different types of liability that societies emphasize in their legal systems and how that plays out in understanding the transition from childhood to adolescence as well as variation in incest taboos.

The significance of the son's insufficient contact with his father during infancy in regard to circumcision and segregation is examined. This article suggests that it is not the long postpartum sexual taboo but the separation of each co-wife that is instrumental in bringing about circumcision and segregation. Expands on Kitahara 1974.

This book examines population growth rate and its correlates by testing 274 hypotheses (derived from multiple theories) with an 18-society sample. Forty-one of these hypotheses were significant at the .05 level, leading the author to accept these relationships as reflective of the real world. The 274 hypotheses are grouped into 51 broader hypotheses, and marked by (*) where relationships are significant as designated by the author or by significance p < 0.05.