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The purpose of this study is to explain the consequences of a changing age structure on social change in the urban industrialized environment. This analysis determines the impact of the younger to the older labor force aged population on both negative and positive forms of social change behavior. The indices of social behavior to be examined are the deviant behaviors of homicide, suicide and certain innovative behavior associated with patent activity. The specific age composition of the population to be examined is the ratio of young male adults aged 15-34 to those aged 35-64. The analysis of main effects of the model is conducted, controlling for the effects of unemployment and urban growth. These control variables have traditionally been documented as being important factors associated with deviant forms of behavior. However, the more contemporary literature increasingly recognizes the relationship between age and the tendency to act out certain social change behaviors. Most of social change emphasizes "negative" deviant behaviors. This study incorporated two innovative measures related to patents in an attempt to measure "positive" forms of deviant behavior. This strategy is used to determine if positive behavior can be explained by the same independent variables used to account for negative behavior. A multiple linear regression model is used to analyze the hypothesis of the research model. The results show a significant relationship between the age composition of the population and the selected indices of social behavior. As expected, the traditional indices of negative deviant behavior are consistent with the findings of the model. The less traditional indices used to measure innovation also result in positive findings. However, the significance of these latter findings is more modest in comparison to those of the traditional measures of deviant behavior. The implications of this study are that when pressure for opportunity builds in the population due to a heavy proportion of young adults, the prevalence of both positive (innovative) and negative (destructive) behavior increases. These behaviors reflect the need within society to change and adapt to population requirements. These dynamics are heightened as our society becomes more urbanized under the circumstances. The task for social policy makers is how to encourage the positive innovative forms of social change.

Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 47-06, page: 3557. Adviser: John R. Herbold. Includes bibliographical references.

This thesis investigates and interprets the origins and political discourses of the post World War II population movement in the United States. It argues that this movement, in part, was artificially created by members of the upper social class. Its most important representatives were the founder of the Population Council, John D. Rockefeller III and the owner of the Dixie Cup Company, Hugh Moore. Reasons for their interest in population control can be found in their concern for the national security of the United States which, they believed, was challenged by Communist expansion. Equally important was their attempt to perpetuate their upper-class privileges by ensuring the continuation of the existing political and social order in the United States. The ideology employed was "overpopulation." But while the image was overcrowding, it was not the industrialized, densely populated countries that were accused of being overpopulated but rather the poor, underdeveloped, often sparsely populated nations in the Third World. Or, similarly, the poor in the US were accused of being the main cause of all kinds of social ills. As poor countries had a higher population growth rate and as poor people tended to have more children than rich people, the poor were the main target of population control. This study, then, shows how pronatalism and antinatalism, the two variants of the population movement, capitalized on the political and social setting of their time in the United States. Although the antinatalists' apparent goal was population control in general, the poor were their main target while the wealthy population, as supporters of American values, did not have to be controlled in number. Similarly, the pronatalists seemingly desired to increase US birth rates, but mainly addressed the more privileged portions of the American population. The attitude toward the poor, and here explicitly toward the Third World, remained antinatalist. / Master of Arts