Considers the effect of data quality and gender of ethnographer on the relationship between female status and cultural complexity. Suggest that data quality controls clarify the nature of the relationship.

The author examines modes of marriage and societal organization from a functionalist (general evolutionary) perspective. He focuses on the relationships of subsistence (economic) patterns, settlement patterns, and social complexity to predicting modes of marriage, with particular emphasis on the importance of subsistence as an underlying structural influence upon social patterns.

This paper "reduces Murdock's 210 categories to 30 variables, and intercorrelates and factor analyzes the variables for six world subdivisions as well as for the entire world." This article also discusses factor analysis as a method and examines the correlations more closely between the two regions that differed the most, North America and the Circum-Mediterranean.

This paper seeks to identify how different practices of food sharing are related to one another, and the degree to which societies in North and South America may share practices with one another. The authors attempt this by using ethnographic literature to break sharing activities down into their constituent, multi-stage parts, and then comparing the prevalence of these parts and their relationships to one another. The study finds that the presence or absence of a distributor in a sharing activity, and who that distributor is, has a significant effect on how sharing is carried out. On the other hand, linguistic relationships between groups seem to have little impact on their sharing practices, and geographic proximity between groups only seems to have a significant effect on sharing practices in North America.

This article uses factor analysis to identify the key variables underlying the many cross-cultural associations reported by Textor (1967). Twelve factors are identified.

This book provides a summary of data available in the Ethnographic Atlas. Social, political, economic, and kinship variables are included, as well as information about religious beliefs, social restrictions, and games. Data is divided into world areas for the purposes of regional comparison.

The expressed purpose of the present publication is to provide a typology of institutionalized dissociational states on a world-wide basis, using biological, situational, and cultural parameters. The study is comprised of field work, literature review, ethnographic research, and cross-cultural statistical analysis. The researchers use these findings to aid in the construction of cross-cultural theory, and to provide a platform for further work on dissociational states to continue.

This study presents a sociological theory of marriage type based on socioeconomic organization. Results suggest that intensive agriculture, more stratification, greater political integration, a fixed settlement pattern, a larger population, and greater labor specialization tended to be correlates of monogamy.

Using HRAF's ethnographic reports from 11 immigrant groups to North America (1959-1989), the author asks: what social structural factors account for these patterns of language loss and retention? While focusing on the second and third generations, this study assesses the impact of residence, religion, school, festivals, homeland, marriage, and labor on language retention. The author suggests that residential closeness and the continued practice of religious rituals from the country of origin are the main factors influencing mother tongue maintenance into the third generation, while participation in community festivals is a marginal predictor.

This book investigates the origins of supernatural and religious beliefs. The author tests associations between various types of beliefs (e.g. witchcraft, monotheism) and various societal characteristics (e.g. mobility, class stratification). Many hypotheses are supported. Theoretical discussion is included, and the author posits that “the belief in a particular kind of spirit springs from experiences with a type of persisting sovereign group whose area of jurisdiction corresponds to that attributed to the spirit” (175).