This book investigates sanctions for nonmarital conceptions or birth. The author conducts cross-cultural tests for hypotheses derived from a variety of theories. Results do not support one theory over another, but suggest that variables such as sociocultural complexity, family structure, descent, fraternal interest groups, sexual inequality, and child-parent relationships all affect the consequences of illegitimacy.

This article presents a review of the scholarly work relating to marital quality. Cross-cultural testing of various predictors of marital qualtiy are presented singlely as well as multiple regression analyses.

This study focuses on the relationship between women's power/status and divorce. Tests of gender variables with measures of divorce highlights the importance of sexual equality in divorce frequency as well as the effect of division of labor on divorce.

This study reanalyzes the work of Barry, Bacon and Child (1957) on sex differences in child socialization. The authors use factor analysis to determine if the results of the original study are consistent with results yielded using modern methods and computer analysis. Authors find that there is no one general dimension of male-female difference in socialization and that the conclusions of Barry, Bacon, and Child have little meaning.

This study employs factor analysis to develop a settlement pattern scale of cultural complexity. Political, economic, and religious factors are identified and implications for the structure of the cultural system are discussed.

Theories about the relationship between warfare, militarism, male dominance and authoritarianism are tested.

The present study aims to evaluate correlations of private property from two of Murdock's datasets, one of 147 societies (1981) and the other of 312 societies (1967). Altogether the author tested 146 variables coded by Murdock against variables regarding the ownership of land and of movables drawn from Murdock (1967), Simmons (1937), and Swanson (1960). In total, there were 51 statistically significant correlations between private property ownership and other variables. Additionally, the author summarizes the results from this article and the two that preceded it stating that throughout all of the correlations he ran, the practice of agriculture, the use of cereal grains, and the presence of castes and classes were the only variables that predicted private property in all of the datasets that were utilized.

This article examines three theories regarding the lack of participation by women in community religious roles. Empirical analysis suggests that only resource theory has predictive power. Most clearly it suggests that women are more likely to be shamans in societies in which they are highly influential in kin networks but maintain minimal control of property. Neither gynephobia nor the presence of sex-differentiated social spheres appears associated with the prohibition of women’s participation in religious roles.

This study investigates responses to childlessness in a cross-cultural sample. Solutions to childlessness appear universal, and magico-religious-ethnomedical solutions seem the most likely to be tried first. Empirical analysis also shows that women are blamed for childlessness more often than men, which the authors suggest could be due to women’s lower status.

Authors hypothesize that grammatical sex gender may be related to social structural variables. Results support this hypothesis and suggest that the degree of sex bias in the social structure is associated with the relative frequency of masculine and feminine nouns in languages with sex gender.