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 study looks at the relationship between the presence of love magic in a society and sexual anxiety. Results show support for the hypothesis that love magic is positively correlated with sexual anxiety.

The myths, legends, and folktales of nearby groups tend to more alike than those of more distant groups. Three competing models attempt to explain this distribution of cultural traits: (1) vertical transmission, (2) horizontal transmission, and (3) independent innovation. The authors examine 18 Arctic hunter-gatherer groups to quantify the extent to which geographic distance, cultural ancestry, and effective population size predict overlap in folktale inventories.

This article compares the relative importance of the sun vs. the moon for a world-wide sample of societies. The contexts in which the sun and the moon are found important are also compared.

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 article investigates paternal warmth, particularly its relationship with parental proximity (often used as its proxy) and maternal warmth. The author also investigates whether paternal warmth, paternal proximity, materal warmth, and socialization for aggression are good predictors of theft, homicide, and violence in offspring.

This study examines different sources of marital stability. Authors find that subsistence dependence between partners provides marital stability and where subsistence dependence is not important, romantic love substitutes as a source of marriage stability.

This article explores the relationship between polygyny and witchcraft accusations in three societies in Kenya. It is argued that the closer co-wives live (have adjacent houses, common yard), the more likely they are to accuse one another of witchcraft. The affects of household structure on population density and intra-household relationships are also discussed.

This article explores the factors that predict rituals of conflict. Hypotheses are derived from Gluckman's analysis of Southeast African rituals of rebellion and are tested against a cross-cultural sample.

This article examines marital residence and sibling coresidence among horticulturalists in the South American lowlands. The authors reject a hypothesis that patrilocality is the defining trait of Amazonian tropical forest culture. Results on horticulturalists are compared with findings on hunter-gatherers: horticulturalists tend to be more uxorilocal. Empirical analysis also suggests that women tend to live with more kin later in life, and in large villages headmen live with more kin than nonheadmen.